49 quotes found
“He wasn't mad, he was sad.”
“Time itself made all things rare.”
“I glory in the emotionally commonplace”
“The secret is that there is no secret.”
“You restored me to the concept of home.”
“If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?”
“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.”
“I may have spent long enough in your orbit to have absorbed your ferocious conviction that a happy family cannot be a mere myth or that even if it is, better to die trying for the fine if unattaina...”
“I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the s...”
“It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substit...”
“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”
“...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.”
“For years Id been awaiting that overriding urge Id always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless women ineluctably to strangers strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the horm...”
“You know that euphemism, shes expecting? Its apt. The birth of a baby, so long as its healthy, is something to look forward to. Its a good thing, a big, good, huge event. And from thereon in, every...”
“Franklin, I was absolutely terrified of having a child. Before I got pregnant, my visions of child rearing- reading stories about cabooses with smiley faces at bedtime, feeding glop into slack mout...”
“These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we cou...”
“The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our childr...”
“They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.”
“Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.”
“Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.”
“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.”
