Acceptance is the word we must substitute for dependence in dealing with the aged. Their acceptance of help, ours of their need..

The Catholic Church with its foreshortened American history and tangled puritanical roots was as inviolate to my mother and father as it was to the l….

Notable American Women is an enchanting and moving novel. Like Italo Calvino and Lewis Carrol, Ben Marcus reconfigures the world that we might see ou….

To fear the bourgeois is bourgeois..

I've finally learned not to want things I cannot have..

Hindsight is common and bland as boiled potatoes..

There's a bad odor about a man who's been betrayed..

Wouldn't a laugh serve us better than to battle it out with our mortal souls?.

I have often caught sight of myself, my spine humped over, defining my hollowness, my head too heavy for my body, swinging like the oversized blossom….

It was unavoidable, my writing. I feel I had no choice in the matter, no more than I had about an unfortunate bone structure and a healthy head of ha….

Even when I was a grown woman, he [Father] would leave me on the edge of hysteria in all our arguments: though I married and lived as far as I could ….

To say a thing simply: I am my history, but the story of my life is always guarded, self-conscious. It is finally the only story we give to someone w….

If he hadn't been my father I would have loved the spectacle he created-one performance following quickly upon another-like a versatile old vaudevil-….

None of the adults I knew ever touched in public, much less kneaded each others flesh..

When I go home my mother and I play a cannibal game; we eat each other over the years, tender morsel by morsel until there is nothing left but dry bo….

I like density, not volume. I like to leave something to the imagination. The reader must fit the pieces together, with the author's discreet help..

The part we play is not as we want it, but as we are made-with the genitals God gave us..

The Golden Arches of McDonald's rise, glorious across the landscape, contempo-monolithic, simple in concept as Stonehenge if we could but see it..