Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.
You see a person with kids,” she said, “and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you’re attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.
Wasn’t asking for a recipe supposed to be good coin of the feminine realm?
He knows how love blinds people to the truth about the one they are in love with.
Eager, perhaps, to repay the favor of listening, Sylvia nodded with encouragement. But suddenly she reminded Enid of Katharine Hepburn. In Hepburn’s eyes there had been a blank unconsciousness of privilege that made a once-poor woman like Enid want to kick her patrician shins with the hardest-toed pumps at her disposal. It would be a mistake, she felt, to confess anything to this woman.
So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you’d think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality.
I said it was OK, I said I loved her, I said not to worry about me. Her breathing became slower and more labored, and then just past noon, it stopped altogether. I laid my cheek on her chest and held her for a long time, not thinking anything, just being an animal that had lost its mother.
Essay’s roots are in literature, and literature at its best invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.
If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life.
His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike himself in this regard.
The fantastic thing about Andreas is he knows the Internet is the greatest truth device ever. And what does it tell us? That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men.
Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death:.
The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away. You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die.
His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he’d done.
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.