Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?
It was hard not to realize what kind of kid his parents wished they’d had, and when he thought about that kind of kid it was tempting for Paul to want to track, hunt, and eat the little thing.
I would like to outsmart the role that is destined for me. But I can’t. I have failed to destroy my category.
Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …
We shared a daughter? I’d not thought about it that way before. If we shared a daughter, and something happened to Claire, then I would not have to hare Esther with her anymore. I would have Esther to myself.
I prefer men who don’t fall down and weep, who absorb a blow, who do not scamper and yell when chased, but stand firm, crouch, square off, meet an attack with something like resistance, even if it kills them.
Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while.
My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else.
A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.
Verbalize someone’s actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.
Perhaps they didn’t know they were at sea. Was there a certain percentage of people at sea who lacked the knowledge that they were at sea?
The task of being right is a task the father perfects over time.
To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.
Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren’t.
I’m attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.