Tom Lake

The cocktail of grief and humiliation and longing battered my heart with such violence I was sure I could feel the muscle tear.

I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand to watch him and so I closed my eyes.

we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.

Duke was on his way up and I was on my way out. Neither of us could have said those words but we knew.

Every day I took a jumble of snags and tears and turned them back into clothes. I found the work extremely satisfying, as I imagine Rumpelstiltskin must have gotten a kick out of spinning all that straw into gold.

She wanted to be her father’s girl, his birthday girl. Growing up was a terrible thing—­a clear path to the third act. Emily showed us that, all those moments in life we had missed and would never get back again.

Her wedding day was played not for eroticism but for fear. She didn’t want to leave home, keep house, make meals, endure childbirth

The leaves on the cherry trees are silvered with moonlight, with flashlight, the branches bent beneath the cherry weight.

maybe they are children looking at their parents and so our lives began when they began and everything else they colored in with fat crayons any way they wanted.

The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.