Her first reaction was to laugh: "That's so like you, Camilla, to lose an entire car." 

When I turned to face you. I knew I had to face you.

It’s clear that most of these students hate Sal, Dean, and Kerouac.

There is an eerie glow to the hollowness of bark that has been stripped of its leaves and fruit

When was the last time she ran? At all? As a real kid in bare feet in grass at her grandparents’ house.

At least I was alone, I tell myself. There’s no one to miss the worlds I destroy but me.

She has a pliant diction, and always after speaking to her mother her accent takes on the squished together sing-song of Spanish. When I... more

I call him “Morty” and he’s one of my most consistent companions.

Each morning when I wake, he whispers:  “Today, you die.”

Look, you smile too much or too little, both at the wrong times, and people don’t like you.  

You know you’re in the shit when you’re looking to fortune cookies for encouragement

Sign up for Match.com. You’ve heard it works. You’ve heard for one out of every three marriages, the couple meets online.

And she doesn’t know a word of German, except “bier.”

You write a book with three parts. Sure, a few critics come down hard, but mostly the book is appreciated.

I saw myself on the Jumbotron. Locked eyes on my eyes looking elsewhere.

It will be great to hear how you have been! Hope we can get to everything in the seven seconds I have allotted our interaction.

Mathias LaFleur: the first Eagles Got Talent contestant ever clapped off stage.

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 goes to see The Clock at Lincoln Center in New York. The Clock was at Lincoln Center from July 13, 2012 to August 1, 2012, but in the book’s acknowledgements, Lerner explains that time in the novel does not always correspond to time in the world. This creates a sort of magical New York where Occupy Wall Street, The Clock, and Hurricane Irene can all be happening practically at the same time.

One time, a pair of blue Tattersalls, two Sigma Chis home from Clemson. Two, again: faded blackwatch shorts and a stretchy lavender thong, smelled like Obsession. Just that one time.

Corbin was listening to Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s T.R.O.Y. and thinking of Trina McIver when shot inside the bodega on Fourth Street.

On stage my son forgets his line and my husband Sam whispers “The winters were hard for the settlers”

In my country, says the bulkier, pastier, frowning president, journalism students are admitted to university according to their eloquence in abbreviating my biography.

I’m just gonna say it. Invisalign is bullshit.

Midway through the school year one of the kids in one of the other sixth grade classes hung himself, so we couldn’t call the game we played in the mornings ‘suicide’ after that. 

Parker’s mental damn busts open the second he sinks a cleat into the batter’s box.  

It was the summer of Monica Lewinsky and Mark McGwire and Armageddon. I was on a short business trip to Philadelphia—a... more