Perhaps she is just old, just tired, just sick to death of me. I suppose, in old age, there is advantage in retreating into a world of one’s own, but not if the place one finds is hell.
He went home to his tiny room and thought about the word lonely and how it sounded and looked so lonely, with those two l’s in it, each standing tall by itself.
from “Loser” in the collection “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt” by Aimee Bender
If I’d been a different sort of person, a braver sort, I’d have taken him by the shoulders and said, “Want whatever you want more fiercely. Be more difficult and demanding. Or you’ll never make a life that uses you.
from “A Home at the End of the World” by Michael Cunningham
I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.” She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction.
from “A Home at the End of the World” by Michael Cunningham
I believed, at that moment, that I had never loved anyone but my parents and these two people. Perhaps we don’t fully recover from our first loves. Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give.
from “A Home at the End of the World” by Michael Cunningham
She looks like a hooker,” my mother had said, and for years I’d believed a hooker was someone who hooked men’s hearts. I’d thought it was a grudging form of flattery.
from “A Home at the End of the World” by Michael Cunningham
Without Jonathan, I haunted my own life. I couldn’t make contact. I walked through the hours like a shade wandering in helpless astonishment through rooms he’d once danced and wept and made love in; rooms he’d once been alive enough to ignore.
from “A Home at the End of the World” by Michael Cunningham
Erich had surprised me with his gentle competence. Something about him touched me—his edgy good cheer and slender prospects. Something about him made me angry. I didn’t know what I felt and I disliked being asked to give my feelings a name. I may have feared that in describing them so early I’d sap them of their potential for growth or change. I may have been right.
from “A Home at the End of the World” by Michael Cunningham
Belief in the future is a disreputable virtue, don’t you think? It’s sort of like building ships in bottles. You know? Admirable, but in a creepy kind of way.
from “A Home at the End of the World” by Michael Cunningham
Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship’s more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.
from “A Home at the End of the World” by Michael Cunningham
Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc — it’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.
Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,” Holly advised him. “That was Doc’s mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That’s how you’ll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.
