Belong to Me

It's a well-known fact. All women are clinically insane, but especially ballet dancers. Psycho. extremely psycho. Trust me.

People in love feel that way all the time, like they don't know what they've done to deserve each other.

But some things, no matter how unlikely, are just supposed to happen. You know what I mean. Some things just smack of the future and feel part of an overarching rightness.

I can't stand lies. Probably no one can. Probably everyone is, to varying degrees, allergic to them, both spiritually and physically. Lies make me feel low and ignoble, and also itchy, like there's sand under my skin. The only thing that feels worse than hearing a lie is telling one.

Sometimes, happiness feels so fragile…So what do we do about it?...Live. Forget that it’s fragile. Live like it isn’t

Everything turned on the word "we", a synonym for love, the thing that saves us all.

I stand here on this spring day in the center of my life. Chaos, din, and beauty. For a moment, I am still.

You know what he said? He said that being away from me is less like being away from a person than being away from other people is. I don't know anyone else who would say something like that. And he was right. When we were apart, I missed him all the time, but he didn't feel faraway. He felt closer than the kids at school."... Certain people are like that, I guess. They're together no matter where they are. They just belong to each other.

I was there to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That's not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be. Certainly there were other people who loved books, I'm sure there were, but whoever had notified them ahead of time that loving books was not the point, was, in fact, a hopelessly counterproductive and naive approach to the study of literature, neglected to notify me. It turned out that the point was to dissect a book like a fetal pig in biology class or to break its back with a single sentence or to bust it open like a milkweek pod and say, "See? All along it was only fluff," and then scatter it into oblivion with one tiny breath.

It's a well-known fact. All women are clinically insane, but especially ballet dancers. Psycho. estremely psycho. Trust me.

Instead, she sat there, smiling that small, small inscrutable smile, like Mona Lisa herself, although I must say that until that moment, I'd never found Mona Lisa's smile particularly interesting or even particularly a smile. Looking at Lake, I understood what probably everyone else already knows about the woman in that painting: we are drawn to her not because of what the smile gives us but because it gives us nothing. We are waiting to get past the smile. We are waiting--we've spent centuries waiting--for the woman to speak.

I think there are certain people who change the way time moves.

When he looked up, he said, "Clare told me about Christmas." And I swear the boy's face began to shine. I recognized what I saw there: that a person's name could be infinitely precious, that just saying it could make you feel singled out for glory.

Its hard to say what was happening inside her head. Her brain doesn't function quite like most people's to begin with and maybe, under a lot of stress, she just lost the ability to hope. Dev pondered this, hope as an ability. I guess that's what's so hard for me to get to, the no hope. To think that, of all the potential scenarios out there, there's not a single good one? It just seems like we- as human beings- know so much, but its nothing compared to what we don't know. The universe surprises us, right? That's just what it does. So how could she be so one hundred percent positive that nothing good would happen?

I know how syrupy this sounds, how dull, provincial, and possibly whitewashed, but what can I do? Happy childhoods happen

But I've always been a sucker for externals alone: the shape, the shine, what the surface suggests to my palm. So mechanically disinclined it's verging on criminal, I never understood the beauty of an object's workings until Linny sat my reluctant self down one day and showed me her camera. Within fifteen minutes, I had fallen hard for the whole gadgety, eyelike nature of the thing: a tiny piece of glass slowing, bending, organizing light - light - into your grandmother, the Grand Canyon, the begonia on the windowsill, the film keeping the image like a secret. Grandmother, canyon, begonia tucked neatly into the sleek black box, like bugs in a jar. My mind boggled.

Maybe she would remember who he was, and maybe she would come back.

What’s killing him is the idea that I will die unhappy, in a miserable marriage. He hates that my life isn’t ending on a good note… So I told him that he’s a good man and was the love of my life, both of which are true. I tried to tell him all the things I hadn’t told him before… Mostly, I wanted him to understand the real reason I’d thought our marriage was over. It was over because we forgot to stay in love. Both of us.

Still Dev missed him. Not all the time or even very often, but now and then, missing would hit Dev, throw him off balance, a sudden, undeniable ache to know his father, how his voice sounded, what his face did when he read the paper or looked at his son. And the missing wasn't fair; it wasn't earned. In fact, the missing, the searching, the imagining were so unfair that when you put them all together, they looked a lot like betrayal.

I have lost things I will never stop missing.

Chicken Soup for the Soul". You've heard of these books, am I right? We've all heard of them. But I wonder if you're aware of just how many "Chicken Soup" books exist on the planet. No offense, but I doubt it. I doubt it because in the time it would take you to come up with a number, the number would have become obsolete. Even as you read this, in some quiet, fecund place, another "Chicken Soup" book is being born.

We think our parents are in charge, right? Like they know what they’re doing? But the truth is, they’re making it up as they go along, just like we are. Just like everyone. If we judge them by their worst mistakes, they’re all, like, gargantuan failures. Maybe you should try judging your mom by her intentions, by whether she, like, loves you and is doing her best.

her salvation lies in creating a tightly woven network of nurturing, sustaining female friends.

Nowadays, I want to be smart, but back then, I'm afraid I wanted to seem smart, too.

It just seems like we --human beings -- know so much, but it's nothing compared to what we don't know.

people, people in every room: Clare, Viviana, Clare’s new father Gordon, Teo’s parents, my parents, Rose sleeping her fragrant sleep a few feet away. “We’ll get hotel rooms,” everyone had offered, but we told them all, “No. Stay.” Sometimes, I think I would like to have us under one roof, all of us, everybody here, which makes no sense, of course. No house is big enough to hold us, with all of our tensions, all our wariness and histories. But imagine the nights, those separate breathings, everyone within my reach and safe, everyone together. I stand here on this spring day in the center of my life. Chaos, din, and beauty. For a moment, I am still. Then “Cornelia,” cuts across the noise, and because one of them is calling me, I go. Acknowledgments I am so grateful to the following people: Brilliant agent and true friend Jennifer Carlson, whose instincts, heart, and good sense never stop amazing me; My editor, Laurie Chittenden, kind, tenacious, and wise, for making me feel that my books and I were born under a lucky star; Everyone at Morrow, especially Lisa Gallagher, Lynn Grady, Will Hinton, Tavia Kowalchuck, Debbie Stier, Sharyn Rosenblum, Dee Dee DeBartlo, Emily Fink, and Mike Brennan; Susan Davis, Dan Fertel, Annie Pilson (seeker of blooming hydrangeas, mellow light, and the perfect shot), and my sister Kristina de los Santos, the sharp and generous early readers without whom I

I lost track of where I ended and the city began, and after a few blocks, I’d have stretched to include the flower stand, the guy selling “designer” handbags on the corner, the skyscrapers’ shining geometry, the scent of roasting nuts, the café with its bowl of green apples in the window, and the two gorgeous shopgirls on break, flamingolike and sucking on cigarettes outside their fancy boutique, eyes closed, rapturous, as though to smoke were very heaven.