Astonish Me - Pg 42

   The motions. She has been trained to believe that the motions are enough. Each motion is to be perfected, repeated endlessly and without variation, strung in a sequence with other motions like words in a sentence, numbers in a code.

Astonish Me - Pg 38

   That day, before, I said you were lucky because you'd decided for yourself what you wanted out of life and I hadn't. But that wasn't true. I realized later I'd decided for myself that I want you. Will you please just consider that I'm the right one? just consider it. Don't decide now. Consider it, I don't know, forever. Or at least until it happens. 
   I am going to have one more little bit of whiskey, and then I am going to mail this. And in the morning I'll probably regret everything, but it'll be too late. 

Astonish Me - Pg 30

   He missed her, but he also felt a self-congratulatory satisfaction in having outgrown her. He learned to play racquetball. He drank beer. He decided on psychology, much to the disappointment of his mother, who had been pushing for medicine. He dated a girl named Sarah and lost his virginity to her. Everything was fine, and then, late one night, drunk, he wrote his first letter to Joan.

Astonish Me - Pg 30

   Their friendship was no longer a thing in itself. They were warily circling a different thing, something that might exist or might not.

Astonish Me - Pg 27

   She smiled ruefully. "With my mom, it's like she's missed the whole point of my entire life. I work myself to death at something that's really actually important, and all she wants is for me to be a secretary. It's not like I know if ballet's going to work out, but I have to believe or else there's no point.

Astonish Me - Pg 26

   As he started across the sand, he kept his eyes on the terrain in front of him, but his nerves were busily mapping her body. His hands were wrapped around the backs of her thighs. He could feel her ropy muscles under his fingers and a film of sweat. The rough plaster of her cast occasionally scraped the outside of his left calf. her arms were around his neck, her sharp chin on his shoulder, the soft points of her small breasts against his back.

Astonish Me - Pg 24

   At first, he had been eager to spend long, unsupervised hours indoors with Joan, but she was so morose that it seemed inappropriate to persist in the hope that they would finally make out, if only to dispel the boredom. Instead he made sandwiches for her that she didn't eat, poured Tab over ice, changed the channel at her bidding, and waited for the unseen filaments of her ligament to knit themselves back together.

Astonish Me - Pg 20

   Jacob and his two older sisters had high IQs, and their father, a naval officer, was frequently reposted, allowing their ambitious, unmaternal mother to skip her children forward in school until they were high school freshmen at twelve and college students at sixteen. The great mercy of Jacob's life was that he grew early (but then stopped--he is not tall) and was a reasonably handsome, affable kid, good enough at baseball and track to avoid classification as an irredeemable nerd.

Astonish Me - Pg 19

   Joan had not appeared to be very attached to the others, had certainly not loved any of them. Then Rusakov came along and swallowed her up, and Jacob's belief that they would end up together one day, after they'd exhausted the dubious pleasures of trying out people they didn't love, had begun to dwindle.

Astonish Me - Pg 15

   The yellow night drops a window-square on the pale sheet. Tom makes a rough sound in his sleep that might be Old or Middle English. The cells continue to multiply.

Astonish Me - Pg 11

   Outside, the three of them find a taxi heading downtown. The city's summer breath rushes forcefully in through the windows, smelling of garbage and gasoline, and they recline in the warm air, saying little, worn out but also energized, their blood circulating smoothly, as though the performance had swept their veins clean.

Astonish Me - Pg 11

   She likes Yvette, finds her dippy and harmless. Yvette was born in France and retains traces of an accent and of continental diffidence even though she has lived in New York since kindergarten.

Astonish Me - Pg 8

   Elaine knows all the bouncers in the city and has enticed Joan to nightclubs and parties where glittering people loom out of the smoke and flashing lights, sometimes in costume--Cleopatras, unicorns, Dionysuses--slip-sliding and pivoting, not caring how they dance, just that they are dancing.

Astonish Me - Pg 4

   Love in a ballet is something that does not exist and then suddenly does, its beginning marked by pantomime, faces fixed in rapture, a dance. After, when they are hidden in the wings or behind the curtain, the dancers will grimace like goblins, letting the pain show.

IF I LOVED YOU, I WOULD TELL YOU THIS - ROBIN BLACK

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 248 : A History of the World

   That is the problem with the past, she thinks, as she flicks off the light. This illusion that revisiting it might somehow change what has occurred, the same illusion that brought her to Italy a week before, that brought her to Orvieto on this day.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 248 : The History of the World

   She couldn't remember him raising his voice at her. At the children, yes, but not at her.
   Catching herself in the mirror, she wonders now whether this detachment was something for which to feel gratitude or more like a sign of things to come.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 227 : The History of the World

   But under her arms there are bristles, sharp among the pale, pouching skin, and standing there, in a just too cold shower, she cannot bear the thought of herself as a woman of a certain age, deserted by her husband, traveling with her brother, a woman whose underarms have grown visibly unkempt.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 222 : ...Divorced, Beheaded, Survived

   There are things that go on, I believe, important things that make only an intuitive kind of sense. Silences, agreed to. Intimacies, put away.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 220 : ...Divorced, Beheaded, Survived

   But of course the children have always known that I had a brother and that he died. A brother named Terrance, Terry. They know about him without my ever having had to tell either of them. Uncle Terry, he would have been. It's family information. The kind that travels in the air that children breathe.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 219 : ...Divorced, Beheaded, Survived

   I don't think about Terry every day, anymore. And sometimes I'm stunned by that fact. It isn't only the discomfort of disloyalty I feel, it's the fact of utter disappearance after death. The idea that as loved as we may be, we may also be forgotten. If only for a day here and there.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 219 : ...Divorced, Beheaded, Survived

   "Mom, he can't be dead."
   I didn't speak.
   Can't be. I know that feeling.
   Can't be.
   But is.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 207 : A Country Where You Once Lived

   It isn't romantic jealousy he's protecting her from now. It's something else. Not that he's found love with another but that he's found love first. That he's leaving this limbo they've shared for thirteen years.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 200 : A Country Where You Once Lived

   As she moves, she dissolves into pixels--Seurat from too close--then reassembles; and unmoored as he feels, it's that process of dissolution and resolution that mesmerizes him. The way the tiny squares of cream and pink and red and brown and white fall apart into nothing, then emerge reorganized as a nipple, an eye, her hand between her legs, her smile. It's as though the computer screen is complicit in the tease of it all and complicit, too, in some greater, grander conspiracy of elusiveness.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 188 : A Country Where You Once Lived

   The tentative hug they exchange in the drive and his first impressions of her become tiny details in what is quickly a bustling, comic scene that includes their reunion and also an errant cow wandering over as though she too wants to catch up.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 188 : A Country Where You Once Lived

   In the end, though, Jeremy didn't write to his daughter because he was ashamed of himself or wanted Rose to think better of him but because something about loving Rose, about Rose loving him, made him believe that it might not be too late.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 182 : A Country Where You Once Lived

   She looked like a wraith, otherworldly, but she did normal things. That was what kept him mesmerized. The way she sat at the kitchen table eating yogurt. The fact that she spoke on the phone. That she listened to music. That she walked through the doorways of their elegant rented town house without falling to her knees at every threshold to reflect on what she had done.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 180 : A Country Where You Once Lived

   Jeremy could only ever remember bits and moments from those two weeks, the ones when she was gone. Merciful amnesia, a friend once called it--except it wasn't very merciful, because only the worst of it stuck with him.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 158 : Pine

   We met at work before Joe died, in the glory days of my marriage, when all I wanted from any man other than Joe was friendship, and all I wanted from friends was that they agree with me that life was good, tat my choices were inspired and my future bright as anything can be.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 157 : Pine

   The other women are oblivious to my tears. They chatter on. They laugh. I feel out of place and absurdly, embarrassingly hurt, angry that no one sees me cry, worried that anyone will, too obvious and too invisible all at once.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 150 : Tableau Vivant

   In bed that night, hearing what she thought were sobs from her daughter's room, unable to go check, lest she was wrong, lest Brooke wasn't alone, lest the heartbroken Aaron was there as well, their hearts breaking together, Jean sat up.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 136 : Tableau Vivant

   The wooden staircase, with its steep treads and its audible objections and the slight curve toward the top, had lain in wait for some years now, a sleeping serpent stretched in their home, ready to snap. It had been something like love, something like the myopia of romance that had blinded them to the inevitable collusion between a staircase and time.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 135 : Tableau Vivant

   But lying in the dark Jean had no doubt, no doubt that there was another person there, no doubt that this person and her daughter were lovers, no doubt at all--like glancing at the back cover of a book and inadvertently, irretrievably knowing too much.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 132 : Tableau Vivant

   Brooke was still standing between Cliff and the TV, and though it had barely been a minute, Jean could see him growing, if not consciously impatient, physically twitchy. It was difficult for anyone else to understand how immersed he was in that world, to appreciate the degree to which caring about those flickers of color and light kept him from brooding on himself.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 131 : Tableau Vivant

   Her body, no longer thin, no longer seemed striving to be thin and had acquired a relaxed, logical quality, as though the wide hips and general sense of plenty were the obvious right choice.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 123 : Gaining Ground

   There once was a man with a daughter,
   Whose electricity ran in her water.
   When his body was found,
   Her house had lost ground,
   But what was the lesson it taught her?

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 121 : Gaining Ground

   Maybe Harris is right. About just this one thing. Just this one time. It costs me to say that, but maybe he is right about the root of this problem. Right, that I just can't believe these two events were unrelated. Just can't accept that it wasn't my father in that electric water, not him streaming through my daughter, not him burning down into me as he walked out onto those tracks and waited there to get killed. Not him hurting us, his flesh and blood even as his life blew away.
   I just don't believe it.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 115 : Gaining Ground

   If electric water isn't an emergency, what is? For one thing, not my father at that point. That much I had taken in. There was absolutely nothing I could do to help him. Which was actually not news; there had never been anything much I could do for him. But it was official now, in some way it had never been before.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 114 : Gaining Ground

   I was going on and on about how bad it's been, about this horror and that, how many times he was in the bin, how long he stayed, which birthdays Dad missed, and what graduations he ruined. And Harris, he just hoists a beer and shrugs: "So what?" I guess that was love. Not his saying it. Me hearing it. "So what?" I heard freedom in that. Like a great big chalkboard eraser getting rid of all that shit. So what. That won me over.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 112 : Gaining Ground

   Then I heard what was being told to me, and I asked, "What kind of accident?" And then I took that in. The train, the dead, the my-father-is-over part. And then I called Harris. And told him something. I'm still just not sure exactly what. But I know I told him to come. I know I did that. So this one's on me, I guess.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 111 : Gaining Ground

   He's got eyes like he knows perfectly well he's wrong. About everything. All the time. And couldn't care less.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 110 : Gaining Ground

   The water ran electric because the house was not properly grounded. Because my electrician is an asshole. And always has been. And ought to be shot. Or at the very least not be an electrician anymore.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 110 : Gaining Ground

   My dad died on the night my bathwater ran with an electric current in it. Or maybe it was the other way around. My water ran electric on the night my father died. In some ways that sounds better, more poetic, I guess. For one thing, it scans. Ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh. But it isn't truly accurate as to what it felt like at the time. It felt more like the first way.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 108 : Harriet Elliot

   Then she looked at me. With those eyes that seemed so powerful they could will away anything in her path. She just stood there, motionless, staring into my eyes, conjuring with her gaze her own determination, those tales of her capture, the smell of crushed flowers and lemon juice, the feel of my words seeping through my skin, spreading out into my veins. The fantasy of putting things to rights. She looked at me until I could feel something like belief again take root. And then Harriet Elliot blinked; and I was gone.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 104 : Harriet Elliot

   The red ink trailed across my skin, leaving markings like the openings of tiny woulds. I could picture the words I had written seeping in. I was certain I could feel them in my veins.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 102 : Harriet Elliot

   "There must be something that you want," she said, back upstairs, after lunch, her door now locked. "Something important enough to make you brave."
   I thought of my parents. I only shrugged.
   "It has to be something you want so much that it hurts. So you feel like your arms and legs will fall off if you don't get it. And your head. Your head will roll away. And your backbone with crumble. So if you think about that, how bad that would be, you can't be scared. Not of other things."

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 95 : Harriet Elliot

   "What do you mean you're going to kill them?"
   She shrugged. "I just am," she said. "But first, I have to grow up. Go through all of this. That's the boring part."

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 92 : Harriet Elliot

   She must have cried for her mother and her father. She must have cried out her eyes. But then, at some point, she must have stopped--an even more frightening thought. And her tights must have faded from white to the pale gray of dirt, and maybe eventually to black. She couldn't have worn the same dress for three weeks. She must have had to change. Change her clothing. Change herself. She must have had to stop being a princess, if only for those days.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 86 : Harriet Elliot

   I would stare inside myself. Lying in the dark, in the nebulous shadow of my mother's beloved Nothingness and in the quandary of my own curiosities, I would look until I slept for the God I had been told did not exist.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 81 : Immortalizing John Parker

   She'll have to pick a point along the continuum of John Parker's life and stop the clock there, search the evidence of her own observations and try to re-create him, as he was--as though that man were more real than the man he is now, as though there's a moment in anyone's life that is the truest one.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 79 : Immortalizing John Parker

   She's thinking of George, of course, of the twenty-one years they didn't have, of the miracle of the five they found, of all the pictures of him she never drew, of her attempt to hold him entirely within herself, to preserve him that way.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 72 : Immortalizing John Parker

   They'll undress. They'll climb into bed. Their bed. Maybe they will make love, and if so, they will see each other forgivingly, as she and George did. Eyebrows and all.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 68 : Immortalizing John Parker

   The four of them stood in a group--she and George, she and Harold, George and Janet--the four of them and the weights of history and secrets and judgements and of so, so many forms of love abandoned now, all crowded in together, in the cool of this church.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 66 : Immortalizing John Parker

   "I don't suppose you'd have dinner with me sometime?"
   "What?" But she's heard him, of course. "Dinner? When? What's the occasion?"
   He frowns, and the eyebrows lower, threatening to obscure his eyes entirely. "No occasion," he says. "Just feeling a bit lonely. Everyone seems to be dying. Maybe that's the occasion."

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 65 : Immortalizing John Parker

   His brows have grown so bushy that if she were still his wife, she decides, she would insist that he deal with them--somehow. If necessary, she would cut them herself, in his sleep. She finds it ridiculous the way they trail down over his eyes, so one has to look at him as though through an upside-down, overgrown hedge. She wouldn't be able to live with them, she's sure. For a moment, she is sure. But then something else occurs to her. Maybe she would love them, she things. If she still loved him. Maybe she would want him as he is.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 63 : Immortalizing John Parker

   She's written George two letters since his death. Two letters in seven weeks... It does indeed sound sophomoric, she thinks as she draws. It sounds as though she is playing word games in the territory of third-rate philosophy. But then George would see past that. He would. He would recognize that underlying all these musings on time and death and portraiture, pretentious as they might seem, she is struggling.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 59 : Immortalizing John Parker

   A streetlight comes on. Clara waits to see how long it will take another to join it. A minute passes, two minutes. Nothing. They must have different levels of sensitivity, she thinks. They must believe different things about what darkness is.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 59 : Immortalizing John Parker

   Some of their best hours together had been passed sitting in this room, her living room, both of them reading, waiting for the sun to drop from view, the daylight to fade, staying there, in that early darkness together, not switching on a lamp, not yet. Tacitly agreeing to fight the evening off. Fight every ending off. Live within all transitions for every possible second.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 58 : Immortalizing John Parker

   She thinks of George and remembers again that he's died. Given time, she knows, that will fade. A day, a day, another day, another day, and soon, she'll be used to the idea. She won't like it, but at least she will know it without having to keep remembering again.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 58 : Immortalizing John Parker

   Clara Feinberg doesn't believe in God; she never has. She believes in time. Omnipotent, surely. Friend and foe both as deities of all religions seem to be. Determining everything about one's life, from the sudden absence of a man like George to the expiration date on a jar of mayonnaise. For now, time will be an ally of a kind, she knows.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 55 : Immortalizing John Parker

   It starts then for her with this odd mixture of familiarity and unfamiliarity, with a chain of thoughts set off by a particular shade of beige, and by the sensation of being back on the passenger side of a vehicle--riding shotgun, in the dead man's seat... It starts there, and then it shifts very quickly into discomfort, the scene being almost something she knows so intimately. It's that unbidden intimacy that slips in and unsettles her.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 54 : Immortalizing John Parker

   Something changed in her, he would say. Something changed, and it wasn't for the worse. Once or twice he ever asked her if she would consider trying to make a go of it again, but the answer was always no. It wasn't an unusual story, he would say. At least not in the beginning. Boy meets girl. Boy cats around. Boy loses girl.

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This - Pg 47 : If I Loved You

   There is a universe of sorrow, wide and dark, in my husband's staring eyes. An eternity built there, constructed over time, forged gradually of the realization that this is in fact our lives. This is what we have been dealt.
   It's possible, I say to him, that you were right. What you said about some folks just being bad.
   But as I speak, I realize how little I want to say what I have learned. How reluctant I am to admit to Sam what indifference truly means, and has long meant to us both. I do not want to play a role in confirming that cruel universe that dwells inside my husband's eyes. But I do love him. I do love him very much. And so to him--if not to you--I speak the truth.