Quotes from Jennifer Haigh

that renunciation of human closeness, of our deepest instincts: is it, in the end, simply too much to ask? Good men-sound, healthy men-can't make the sacrifice, or don't want to; has Holy Mother settled for the unsound and unhealthy? Has the Church, ever pragmatic, made do with what is left?

More than anything in life, she wishes she'd let him. That she'd smiled for the camera. That she'd said yes. Life was gone before you knew it;how foolish she'd been to refuse any of it.

But his singing was unconscious and irrepressible - an expression of his native exuberance, the dreamy, buoyant soundtrack running through his head.

What can a photograph mean? It seems to me, now, that it's not so much the image itself as the fact that it was kept. In my own bedroom closet are three large boxes I labeled—late one night, in a dark mood—PLUTONIUM. They are filled with my own keepsakes and very heavy, decades of living distilled down to a few potent sentiments: tenderness, longing, regret.

It was the oldest friends who mattered most. With each passing year, Paulette realized this more deeply. She thought of her borther Roy, retired to Arizona, to golf with other men who were also - she loathed the expression - senior citizens. Roy had arrived in Phoenix with an entire life behind him, a career, a marriage; to his new friends he'd always be old.

Often enough, one of us will make the other laugh so hard and long that asphyxiation seems a real danger. It's a heady pleasure rare in adulthood, not unlike—I will say it—the shared breathlessness of rousingly successful coitus.

In any industry Claudia could think of, this failure rate would be unacceptable. If breasts were a consumer product, the manufacturer would be forced to issue a recall.

Like all young people, she'd once harbored the unconscious conviction that the world had begun the day she was born. Time had disabused her of this notion. It was, she supposed, the fundamental difference between youth and age. She

You knew about that?" Nearly thirty years later, the memory was still embarrassing. I worried what it said about me. At best it seemed to point to some intrinsic foolishness, a deep-seated eccentricity that lurked within me still.

My heart aches for her. I am, myself, no stranger to this waiting, the charged and terrible uncertainty that follows the surrender to passion—this dangling in limbo, waiting, waiting for a man to call.

And yet there's no denying that these events generated a tidal wave of confusion and shame, and neither party was much of a swimmer.

She took offense. Suddenly Gil Pyle's past seemed crowded with women, the ex-wives and girlfriends he mentioned casually, frequently, as though Paulette were an army pal or a drinking buddy. Wrinkled, sexless, all but irrelevant. A former woman, neutered by age.

The truth is that he doesn't like to move his laptop. In his barren apartment it hums continuously. Evenings, weekends, he spends most hours in front of it. Ambidextrous, he mouses with his left hand and eats dinner with his right.

The air smelled of sweet ocean, a special thing. As a little girl she'd identified a half dozen ways the sea could smell, briny or fishy or sandy or green. A few times each summer, for reasons she couldn't explain, the breeze smelled of molasses, dark and sweet. ….

That night he'd glimpsed, however briefly, a sweetly exalted human happiness he'd only read about, Art who'd spent his whole life reading about apparitions. In those few moments he knew genuine tenderness, given and received. He experienced grace. If it sounds like heresy, I am far past caring: for my brother, making love to Kath was a reflection of divine love, a brief flash of God alive in the world.

She lay awake and thought of her mother, gone forever. There was no one else she wanted to tell.

It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.