She was hidden, she was private, she was like one of those little Russian eggs, infinitely ornate inside. It was her egotism. He’d found it.

Comedy was a theatrical form Paul had never pursued; he had always been more serious, a tragedian.

I bounced the ball up and down, thinking about the cruelty of the situation, the long days of neglect ahead of me, dismissed as the American, as a nonentity.

People think kids have no fear of time, no sense of the past, because they’re kids. Wrong.

The place made a lot of fuel, but its most abundant creations were feral cats.

I don’t care how nice you are, becoming a mother grants a certain capacity to take action, like a hot holiday chestnut cracks open inside you.

Now it was always Saturday again and I always had to go to my job at the vintage glasses store.

“We’ve lived a hundred years, shouldn’t we prepare for what comes next?”

The twins had long harbored the desire to murder their father and make the modest point that greed and desecration do not always go unpunished.

Until now, I’d hardly believed that they could think, let alone create and then conceal elaborate lies about my life and my character.