Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn’t tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
The good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job.
Wasn’t there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?
…whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
The existence of other people is essentially awkward.
Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman’s cunt.
Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived.
Reading time is precious. Don’t waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously put you off the activity altogether.
They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him – because broken machines are easier to fix.
We’d been assured it wouldn’t be painful, though she might experience ‘discomfort,’ a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn’t yours.
Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, “son might turn out to be a killer” would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:1. H
Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.
Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]
If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go.
I thought at the time that I couldn’t be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that’s a common conceit, that you’ve already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.
For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis — I don’t care!””Huh,” I considered. “I guess I don’t either”.”Most people don’t! All they care about,” he added grimly, “is being right”.
I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story.
They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him – because broken machines are easier to fix. p303
You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it.
My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.
In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity.
A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.
I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
We all do it (or I used to-yes, once in a while, Franklin, what did you think?), we all know we all do it, but it isn’t customary to say, “Honey, could you keep an eye on the spaghetti sauce, because I’m going to go masturbate.
…trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.
Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it’s against the rules, isn’t it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn’t.
To a man and woman, all of her elderly patients had been surprised to be old – which Avery privately regarded as a serious failure to pay attention.
How lucky we are, when we are spared what we think we want!
Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
A lot of people get so hung up on what they can’t have that they don’t think for a second about whether they really want it.
The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.
In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.
You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.
But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.
I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.