“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.”
“Long ago, in a former age and a bygone time, there was a king who wished to test the loyalty of his people. He issued a command that for one night no light must show in any part of the city.”
“The house by the river belonged to an old man whose relationship to George Meshaw was complicated but easily covered by 'cousin.' He had lived there alone, with a painting that was probably a Bonnard.”
“What follows is a story of contagion, and it begins, as all such stories must, with a message both obscure and appalling.”
“The little girl’s laughter jars on my ears. I turn to look at her. She dashes through the airport lounge, brandishing her doll with a buoyancy unsuited to the time of day.”
“My father had his own way of going to the mountains: scarcely inclined to meditation, full of obstinacy and arrogance.”
“In different periods, artists “imitated life” differently, because, duh, life was different.”
“A clap of thunder seems to rip open a hole in the sky. I watch rain pelt down in hard sheets from the upstairs balcony and worry about my younger daughter, who is stranded at school.”
“Sara got out of the pool the same way she always got out of the pool: attempting to quell the greasy feeling, the revulsion that her own wet body produced.”
“Throughout our twenties, nobody in our friendship group had been willing to admit they wanted to procreate. It was a shameful, secret pursuit, like skiing.”
“Ziggy is fucking frozen all the way through by the time they finally find the party, by the time she and Emily get the nerve to open the door to the old rundown house that thumps with bass and rattles with people.”
“Frances was fucking her heart out on top of me. Cursing, wild-eyed. This was the picture I had in mind whenever anyone would ask me why we were still together. This is why we’re still together.”
“In his school bag is a book of raffle tickets for the sports club. When he’s finished his dinner he’ll go around the houses he can see in the photo to sell some tickets.”
“June of that year was a month of martyrs and bloody days. In answer to the cries of 'Down with the shah!' and 'Down with imperialism!' the holy city of Qom had been set ablaze.”
“Every time Michael told Gina about how he had become her father’s debtor—the old man’s slave, he always said—the story changed a bit.”
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