She drew on her cigarette, blew out. "Of course, you're a lot prettier than I was-you'd have won the contest hands down!" she laughed. "But prettiness is always about pleasing people. When you stop being pretty, you don't have to do that anymore. I don't have to do that anymore. It's my show now." She said these words as if she were a movie star ( Read more... )

In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside. (5 ( Read more... )

I still can't stand the sound of those 1950s harmonies-like a drink you got drunk on as a teenager, just the smell of it brings back the nausea. (15)

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What am I doing married to men who come up with excuses like this?(p. 133 ( Read more... )

"Why not say what happened?"-Robert Lowell

Running the Room

...because she still looked naked, like she trusted him with everything. (17)

Intermediate GoalsI want to say what I feel is craven. Craven. It's raw sounding-a combination of hunger and large dark bird. When you look it up in the dictionary, though, it means cowardly. That's crazy. ( Read more... )

She felt it might have been the hardest thing he had done all day, or all his life. (42)

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Preston Sturges said of Mary Desti, "In no sense was my mother a liar...nor even intentionally unacquainted with the truth. She was, however, endowed with such a rich and powerful imagination that anything she had said three times, she believed firmly. Often, twice was enough." For Duncan, once was perhaps enough. (xii)

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"True Detective"

Television took the bite out of crime, leaving the detective as nothing more than a lifestyle. It seemed that anyone could solve a murder as long as he had a telephone, a few hours of spare time, and a wet bar. My mother had all three ingredients in spades. (62)

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I have much more criticism for this book than I do praise, and I don't think I would ever recommend it to anyone, but I gave it three stars on Goodreads because, FOR WHATEVER REASON, I read all 814 pages. I may write more about what specifically I disliked about it in another entry.

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One was too sensitive, too raw, there were thorns and pin-pricks in so many words that in reality fell lightly on the air. (10)

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