I can always tell if someone’s from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.
I think what happened to me was that I was always being taught to look, but one day I started to see. And it was because a lot of women in my life were refusing just to be looked at, to be this passive figure.
Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.
Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertibe knowledge that she will never forgive you.
You know how it is when you get back with somebody you’ve loved. It felt better than it ever was, better than it ever could be again.
Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.
She’s sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.
You don’t want to let go, but don’t want to be hurt, either. It’s not a great place to be but what can I tell you?
You can’t be a human without seeing.
Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn’t mean you don’t have them.
Love is the only thing – I don’t want to say that “makes it bearable” – but I feel like without the possibility of love, this place would just devour us.
Books don’t live and die by awards. You don’t listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.
Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That’s the nature of genre.
I am a person who dreads any kind of public exposure and any kind of public event. I spend all day, if I have to do a reading, preparing.
To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs.
You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.
I think men spend so much time passing for being men.
The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.
Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations – but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.
Honestly, connecting once at the deepest level with someone, you know, once you’ve done that, even if your life goes to hell, man, it was really worth living.