26 quotes found
“The task of being right is a task the father perfects over time.”
“Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.”
“My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else.”
“Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren't.”
“A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.”
“Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while.”
“What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?”
“When a man modifies or adorns a woman's name, or dispatches an endearment into her vicinity, he is attempting at once to alter and deny her, to dilute the privacy of the category she has inherited ...”
“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 ”
“The true elitists in the literary world are the ones who have become annoyed by literary ambition in any form, who have converted the very meaning of ambition so totally that it now registers as an...”
“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...”
“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.”
“Until the notion of Helmet-Assisted Life catches on with more people, you may be seen as a threat if you wear a helmet during moments of intimacy. Yet it might also be true that relaxed intimacy ca...”
“Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy from (wife...”
“The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, ...”
“Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.”
“It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that ...”
“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?”
“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 ...”
“Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps ones hands free of another mans throat, free of ones own. These machines have all, a...”
“A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.”
