A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day – nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone’s mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part.

After Connie and I broke up, I played a little game with myself out on the streets of Manhattan. It was called Things Could Be Worse. Things could be worse, I said to myself, I could be that guy.

Why not just go with it? Just walk the dog and send the tweets and eat the scones and play with the hamsters and ride the bicycles and watch the sunsets and stream the movies and never worry about any of it? I didn’t know it could be that easy. I didn’t know that until just now. That sounds good to me. I think I might be able to do that. Who couldn’t do that? It would take somebody mentally ill not to do that, and I’m not mentally ill.

Her internalization of Catholicism and its institutional disappointments suited a dental office perfectly, where guilt was often our last resort for motivating the masses.

Unless by some miracle, he got up from the chair and changed his life. Unless some store of character revealed itself, and with a little guidance from me, he returned in six months a new man. But even then, I thought, that change, that character, would have to be in him already. I was never going to manufacture it with a few stern warnings – God knows I’d tried – and pain forgets within the hour what it learns in an instant.

Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He’s make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days.

This is really what you want? To live with a poet?” “Yes,” she said. “With the hot plate? And the lice?

Things Could Be Worse And Things Could Be So Much Better – that became the game, my running commentary on the streets of Manhattan, and I played it as well as the other slobs just trying to get by.

I know what to do with my life. I just don’t know what to do with this one night.

The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected.