Angelina said, “Mom. I don’t want you to die. That’s the whole thing. You took from me the ability to care for you in your old age, and I wanted to be with you when you died, when you die. Mom. I wanted that.
She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at ths age, to tell her he had pitied her for years.
People always kept moving, her mother had said, it’s the American way. Moving west, moving south, marrying up, marrying down, getting divorced – but moving…
It seems to Henry, as he takes his seat in his usual middle pew, that women are far braver than men
She said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tel us who we are and what we think and what we do.
… and that was when I learned that work gets done if you simply do it.
This is not the story of my marriage. I cannot tell that story: I cannot take hold of, or lay out for anyone, the many swamps and grasses and pockets of fresh air and dank air that have gone over us.
He hated dishonesty– or lack of courage– more than anything.
I like these experts because they seem decent, and because I feel I know a true sentence when I hear one now. They do not know what my mother remembered. I don’t know what my mother remembered either.
You just stood up to your mother…. I should think now you could take on the world.
She had spells of manic loquaciousness, followed by days of silence.
This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You’re not doing it right.
Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic–you were made to feel guilty about everything
I never wrote him. I never saw him again. He was just gone, this dear, dear man, this friend of my soul in the hospital so long ago, disappeared. This is a New York story too.
But early on I saw this: You are wasting time by suffering twice. I mention this only to show how many things the mind cannot will itself to do, even if it wants to.
She pictured a dandelion gone by, the white, almost airless pieces of her family scattered so far.
I don’t especially like to travel, not the way many people do. I know many people that love to go to far-off and different places, and I’ve never been like that. I seem to get homesick as quickly as a child.
I’ve always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I’ve always been touched by the idea of criminality.