I was very young, and so I know,” my mother said. “I know what can happen.” “We’re not you,” Anabel said. “That’s what everyone thinks,” my mother said. “They think they’re not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons.
My practical intelligence said no, but my heart said yes.
The American middle-class appetite for illegal drugs provided the capital to build some of the most sophisticated and effective companies on earth.
The thing about games is that you don’t want to look too closely at why you’re playing them. A great yawning emptiness underlies them, a close relative of the nothingness that lies beneath the surface of our busy lives.
The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was.
Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.
The shame and disorder in his house were like the shame and disorder in his head.
You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen.
Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person’s, and singularities like this are where you find eternity.
She didn’t need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger.
Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?” “I’m a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I’m poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.
Walking is broken falls, the body leaning, the legs advancing to catch it.
I guess I was just trying to say that the Internet is good at satisfying needs from a distance. Male or female.
That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men. The men are all looking at pictures of women, and the women are all communicating with other women.
We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power.
A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling.
Kluger notes that these cases arguably amount to “personal injury claims in disguise,” and that the Supreme Court has ruled that federal cigarette-labeling laws are an effective shield against such claims. Logically, in other words, the states ought to be suing smokers, not cigarette makers. And perhaps smokers, in turn, ought to be suing Social Security and private pension funds for all the money they’ll save by dying early.
What happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?
She’d been drinking jug wine steadily for four hours.
No one stays haunted by a person they’re not still in love with.