“On a Tuesday I came home from school to an empty house, watched the evening news, and then took two Equanil caplets lifted from my mother. Nothing happened, so after an hour I took three more, and then maybe more after that, I can’t remember.”
“At the time, Luís Tinoco was twenty-one. He was of medium height, bright-eyed, tousle-haired, inexhaustibly loquacious, impetuous, and passionate.”
“In the first few hours, confusion. The numbers kept changing. The French were saying 121 dead, which meant—according to the manifest—there must be 11 alive.”
“First he would have to go and see his mother. He would tell her—something about Vanessa, not everything of course.”
“'If you have to drink, then do it someplace where it won’t bother anyone,' his wife had said.”
“For Her it was no small problem, to respond to his wish in light of what she could fathom of it: to understand the request without even being clear on what a 'man of her life' might be.”
“À l'oeuvre on reconnaît l'artisan. You can tell an artist by his handiwork.”
“The year I lick so much LSD off stamps I have to use Elmer’s glue to back the twenty-center for a postcard cash request to my mother, that I am alive note at the end of term, is the year of all the 'wine' parties.”
“Singer suffered from a peculiar sense of shame that didn’t bother him on a daily basis but did pop up occasionally; he would remember some sort of painful misunderstanding that made him stop short, rigid as a post, with a look of despair on his face, which he immediately hid by holding up both hands as he loudly exclaimed: 'No, no!' ”
“First, she was the sound of a breaking branch. A splintered knucklecrack shattering the quiet of these western Montana woods.”
"Isaac Page rides shotgun in a Chevy Cavalier. Backpack between his feet. The Grand River behind him.”
“One day garrett asked Berg to help him drop off Vespucci’s father’s canoe at the local boatbuilder’s shop. They loaded it onto the roof of his truck and drove north along the bay.”
“ 'You’re not a monster,’ Mother used to say. ‘Just a little beast.’ ”
“I drove from the farm into town this morning for my aerobics class, and became one among a legion of middle-aged women reflected in the mirror behind the instructor. ”
“Last night, after she had finished the red wine and then discovered where Leslie had hidden the bottle of whisky, she clumsily knocked over an empty glass and watched as it spiraled to the floor and smashed.”
“Evening swept through the Delta: half an hour of mauve before the sky bruised to black. It was Chike Ameobi’s twelfth month as an officer in Bayelsa, twelve months on the barren army base.”
“After the incident with the power washer, I was determined to get my life together.”
“My girl’s cousin came over. ‘Hey, y’all! Ch’all dewn?’ she said, striding in and setting down her massive key chain.”
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