Because my mother hadn’t been an ostentatious or performative person, it had taken me a long time, until college really, to realize how smart and funny she was, and how generously compassionate.
There are two kinds of marriages: the ones where you’re privy to how messy they are, and the ones where you’re not.
Mark Twain say something about courage being the mastery of fear rather than the absence of fear?
A lesson I learned from Bill, a lesson that perhaps should be obvious, though there’s evidence that most other people don’t know it, either, is that direct and sincere compliments are shockingly effective – that they feel wonderful. What in theory should sound saccharine or manipulative rarely does in practice, so long as you believe the other person really means it. And we crave praise not, I think, because most of us are egomaniacal. It’s because we’re human.
A sense of humor is always a bonus. As with dinner companions, so it is with short stories.
A dystopian story must not merely be dystopian; it must also be a story. Premise can only get you so far.
Not only will I be there,” Liz said, “but I’ll be impersonating a pleasant woman with great manners.
If I’ll never know how much this was my path because of fate and how much because I willed it, the question is less important than that I made it across. Now other women know they, too, can make it, and not because I or anyone else tells them. They know because they’ve seen it happen.
Could it be that Noah was one of those rare guys who didn’t essentially dislike or mock women, and who also didn’t ignore our existence, and who also didn’t see us primarily as objects of lust? That he was weirdly, disarmingly fine with us?
All of which was to say that the sketches I’d written over the years about the absurdity and arbitrariness of beauty standards for women had arisen not from my clear-eyed renunciation of them but from my resentment at their hold on me.
It was a belated realization to have, but it occurred to me that perhaps this was how grown-up conversations worked – not that your communication didn’t falter, but that you both made good-faith attempts to rectify things after it had.
Aren’t we all just looking for someone to talk about everything with? Someone worth the effort of telling our stories and opinions to, whose stories and opinions we actually want to hear?
Sometimes when I speak, I feel like I’m writing dialogue for the character of myself. I’m impersonating a normal human when really I’m a confused freak.
Perhaps, as was often the case with human interactions, it meant nothing.
You know the advice about how you should always play tennis with people better than you? When I’m talking to you, I’m a funnier and smarter version of myself because you’re funny and smart.
If you’re our age and single, dating kind of has to be an act of reckless optimism, right? The triumph of hope over experience?
His expression became both very tender and very amused, as if there were an excellent inside joke between us, and he tilted his head to the right and looked at me with a focused kind of sweetness and warmth.
I knew how when you really liked a boy, all the little daily incidents shrank and slipped away. You carried around you anticipation of seeing him again and retrieved it when you felt bored or anxious, like a memory of something good.
If you were a writer, you could be impressive in a cerebral sort of way, but if you were a musician, you got to be viscerally magical.
I’m not going to say the rule doesn’t exist, but it’s like Santa Claus. It’s only real if you believe in it.