" What had been happening in Diedre’s life prior to the summer of 1985, the month of July, when he drove up to the Shell where she worked in his 1976 green Ford Pinto, dressed in resort-owner pants and a guayabera, pupils massive behind a pair of expensive-looking Ray-Bans?”
“It’ll take you a long time to talk about martial law, and you’ll never talk about it with anyone who lived through it with you. But for now, you don’t go to the rallies, you don’t join the student protests; you go silent or change the subject when someone at your table in the canteen brings it up.”
“Anita is sitting, or rather crouching, hugging her upraised legs, head lowered, forehead resting on her knees, inhaling her own warm vanilla scent.”
“A few years ago, following the modest success of a book I had edited, I was invited to give a series of lectures at a university in a small and somewhat remote city in central Europe which I shall not name.”
“Mother says: Life is made like string. We need to braid it until we can no longer distinguish its threads from our fingers.”
“I first read part of the novel À la recherche du temps perdu, translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, in January 1961, when I was aged a few weeks less than twenty-two years. What I read at that time was a single paperback volume with the title Swann’s Way.”
“The pianist’s entrance is always a big moment, I had expected this moment to be a big one and I wasn’t disappointed.”
“Karole kaner had been one of Leda’s favorite professors. She was an aloof woman who wore indefinable writerly clothing (Is that a vest or a robe or just a dress maybe?).”
“Before falling asleep, concentrated and magical, she would say farewell to things in a last instant of lightly illuminated consciousness. She knew that in the half-light 'her things' were better living their own essence.”
“The whole great office had been organized for the war, and functioned at a slacker pace nowadays; but the staff of the department was still complete. The men who worked there were the best in the country at the particular work concerned. They were known jokingly within the Ministry as the 'twenty-four geniuses.' ”
“As an illustration of what I was up against at Napa State Hospital, what they used to call an asylum for the criminally insane, my fellow inmate Arn Boothby, an angry three-hundred-pound paranoid schizophrenic who regularly “cheeked” his meds, tried to kill another inmate one day in the client convenience store by grabbing his throat and throwing him through a glass display case.”
“Captain Renzi's gaze was lifeless: instead of establishing a dialogue with his interlocutor, he'd been tasked to ensure it wouldn't happen. Even his way of talking put people off: he meticulously avoided any kind of intimacy, which made any dialogue with him as abstract as a carpet's geometric patterns.”
“My brother Abram Ball died in 1998. He was twenty-four years old and had Down syndrome.”
“If I concentrate, I can see where the river should be. It almost doesn’t exist, like the blue of skim milk.”
“Elizabeth Bishop, a person I admire, once lived in Brazil. She wrote a book about the country for the Life World Library. She fought with the publisher over points of style, and complained theatrically about it in letters to Robert Lowell.”
“Mikey Callahan discovered something about himself when he was six years old. Students from his first-grade class were taken one at a time from the classroom and ushered to the gymnasium for standard medical tests.”
“In the windy city they sway on a bridge and let the wind get under their dresses, Claire and Julia, happy. Let them be happy. They have suffered.”
“My mother loved limits. They were a ten-foot fence guarding her and her family. Nothing could get in, nothing could get out.”
“When he was two years old the boy was dropped off at the donation door at the Salvation Army secondhand store in Tunica wearing nothing but a sagging diaper.”
“Things, as we know, disappear—often under strange circumstances—and they don’t come back.”
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