Animal Quotes
"You can flap one wing, but you can’t fly on it."
"He said he’d never cheated on his wife with anyone other than me."
"Sometimes you are little more than a crimped apparition, like the heat that rises off the macadam in front of your car."
"I would have burned the whole world down to get you back."
"If a man takes longer than two, three months to ask you to marry him, he doesn’t love you."
"Sometimes I dreamed of being married to Warren Zevon, eating drugs with him at Joshua Tree and curry out of stained boxes in the rains of Shoreditch."
"But this was not one of those times. I had to turn off old air conditioners. I had to suffer the grotesqueries of crushed old men."
"What’s more important is dispelling several misconceptions—about women, mostly. I don’t want you to continue the cycle of hate."
"A string quartet played 'Hallelujah' on the tall, crunchy grass."
"My father smiled. No, he said in his decent Italian, she will make it on her own."
"I wanted to fall in love since kindergarten."
"I felt a hatred rise up in me that day, one that had always lurked."
"The boy kissed me—the tongue and the lips, more sensual than I’d imagined."
"For most, the money is freeing, so they see the hours of work as a way out."
"I have had a strange relationship with money, as I’ve told you."
"Every time I accepted a job I felt terrorized, like I was about to be sent to jail."
"The smell of the pool up there was deeper. The chlorine was richer."
"The notion of the accordion, of stuffing the gaps, it was so large-seeming a problem that it made me want to curl into a fetal position."
"Everything reminded her of him. It was too painful."
"She couldn’t be in the same country where he died."
"Jimmy Dean died on that road. In his perfect little car."
"The air smelled of crabs as we got out and the sun hit me in that evocative way it does after you have a beer on an empty stomach."
"I stood behind her in line and stared at her pornographic legs. Strong calves and soft thighs."
"The times you are most willing to die are, ironically, the times you are having the most fun."
"Clams, beer. The occasional fuck. Twice a month, someone nice. Hey? I really weirdly want to know all about you."
"I thought of all the boys I had jerked off because I didn’t want to risk disease by putting my mouth on some twiggy, contagious penis."
"Everybody wants to be Italian, Alice said, and there you are, trying to slough off your own particular beauty."
"I could make a man like Vic cut another man’s throat for me, but I could not get the twenty-four-year-old to call me the morning after we fucked."
"Women have the upper hand. It’s taken me half a lifetime to realize it."
"There are rapes, and then there are the rapes we allow to happen, the ones we shower and get ready for."
"Nobody comes to the canyon unless they do."
"I wonder if you know how rage can stiffen the shaft. It’s like a war cry."
"I shook my head in revulsion. I thought I’d expended all my disgust on hearing from men about what they were owed."
"The evils we have done would be pointless if they didn’t get passed down so that others might not make the same mistake."
"I only feel sorry for your wife, Lenny. This stupid woman who wanted a child that you were too empty to give her."
"When you’ve been raped in a dress, you might think you want to burn it but I didn’t."
"The way she held herself in my doorway was all her father."
"He had to be in the office. Such a fucking load, and we knew it."
"In Pennsylvania they grow a lot of bad apples."
"You probably already know, she began, how we go as a family to Anguilla every year."
"I could call up the hideous event, but in a far-off way."
"Part of me hoped for a car accident, something absolving."
"I felt peace and happiness. I knew it wouldn't last but I allowed myself to feel it for as long as it did."
"The notion that I might have forgotten the way he made love."
"She smiled as she took it from me and thirty minutes later she was passed out on the couch."
"The world will call it madness. You can’t convince normal people otherwise."
"I don’t think she ever saw me as a child."
"He was still and resolute in all ways. A steadfast man."
"All my life, all the men taking what they wanted and leaving when it was over."
"I thought how anyone would say I kept asking for it."
"I hated him for how little he knew about fine things."
"A female God would know who could be trusted with a child."
"The walls were permeable; for years my parents had been waltzing in and out recklessly."
"I was trying to be perfect. I was about to have a child and yet I was mostly thinking of not scaring Alice away."
"I could not believe he’d lied to me. That he’d told me I was the first and the only."
"I’d been waiting to get to this point for many months. I’d been waiting to tell her."
"She smiled and thanked him as though it were no big deal and yet it broke my heart in the holiest of ways."
"My rage was growing by the second. I felt the tendons in my neck straining like a junkyard dog’s against a chain."
"I felt close to my mother then, to feel her rage in me."