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The success is deserved, I think: certainly it was not lightly gained.

I am going to relate to you the most lamentable love affair of my life.

He is not in the position to lose a friend. Not when one is all he has.

What small song do you sing under your breath that is only for you?

Of all she taught me I like best the lore of spray-on cologne.

I’m guilty—locating my gratitude against someone else’s suffering.

Anything can happen because everything happens in New York.

Louise Farmer Smith

Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.

Mild nights would have us out of doors—at their opening I am rapt.

Cheer and cheer and cheer she sings a song on nesting wings.

With a world full of foolishly dangerous men, what’s a mother to do?

As our friendship declined into torture, the prairie grew hotter.

His shirt, he realized, was completely soaked, and he could actually see his heart rippling beneath the cotton.

She’s coming back, her arms full of the flowers I gave her once a year.

The dead men don’t look like themselves or anybody else.

It’s a girls’ college we’re going to, but all the guys know Polly’s name.

Ms. Marmelstein led with her eyelashes, curling out like scimitars.

Men can’t sense like that. Or won’t. Even a father don’t dare get that close.

Sherman Alexie

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.

These days I watch the world go by and do not breathe life into it.

Grant had a lot of buttons on that coat—when he wore it.

In all the faded retellings of that night, there’s a lot he left out.

Then came “the sea of trouble” as he crumpled his bank statement.

Cruelty is cruelty and you don’t ask why, you just hit first and hit hard.

What were the unsafe things to say even in a thirty-year marriage?

Someday you’ll understand, darling. Everyone will just—vanish!

Real, I tell him, is a concept reserved for those who have been born.