We Were the Mulvaneys

In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?

Marianne laughed. But you can’t disappoint me! I don’t love you.

P.J. said, "That's true about any statement we make, isn't it? We never tell as much as we know." "Right! So We're lying. So almost every statement is a lie, we can't help it." "Yeah. But some statements are more lies than others.

In that way you recall, suddenly, sharply, in daylight, a trace of a dream of the previous night--but even as you recall it, it begins to fade.

Oh, it’s a terrible, cruel thing—first you’re young, and that takes up such a long time you think it’s forever, then suddenly you’re not young, and you never get used to it—and, oh dear, there’s just the one way out.

During these mad dashes to the wall phone in the kitchen she hadn't time to fall but with fantastical grace and dexterity wrenched herself upright in midfall and continued running (dogs whimpering, yapping hysterically in her wake, cats scattering wide-eyed and plume-tailed) before the telephone ceased it's querulous ringing--though frequently she was greeted with nothing more than a derisive dial tone, in any case.

It simply fell from him, like a heavy overcoat he'd shrugged off, no longer needing its warmth or bulk to protect him.

Thinking of such things like they’d happened years ago already and not just a few weeks back. For once life begins to accelerate it goes faster and faster.

Love you in that cheerleader’s costume. Last Friday. You didn’t see me I guess. But I was there.

Well, no. Marianne thought there could be lots worse.

It struck her to the heart, left her weak, disoriented, that, to Michael Mulvaney, after all, his family wasn’t quite enough.

Della Rae was a pig and she was smashed out of her skull and you didn’t want to think about it,

the United States government was at the mercy of special-interest groups, lobbies like the National Rifle Association and the American Medical Association, the automobile and oil industries, every kind of defense manufacturer, how could democracy be served?

if she petted or fed one animal in the presence of others, she must pet and feed them all. It was what Jesus would have done had He lived intimately with animals.

Memory blurs, that’s the point. If memory didn’t blur you wouldn’t have the fool’s courage to do things again, again, again that tear you apart.

I believe in uttering the truth, even if it hurts. Particularly if it hurts.

What had they been talking about?

No noose is good noose’—as the condemned man said on the scaffold.

Because nothing between human beings isn’t uncomplicated and there’s no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

How happy she was, how elated!

A dog’s life is a speeded-up version of your own. After a while, you can hardly bear to be a witness.

(always, you want to impress them: men of authority)

It was Corinne’s secret belief that her daughter was a far finer person than she was herself, a riddle put to her by God. I must become the mother deserving of such a daughter—is that it?