Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

The nylon made a luxurious swishing sound and the hood framed her face with a black halo of fur. It was like walking around in a sleeping bag trimmed with mink.

“Oh, well, you know. It’s not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life, but it’s fine.”

It’s a funny business, this. Making things up. Describing things. Describing the door someone just walked through. It’s brown, the hinges are squeaky… Who gives a shit? It’s a door.”

this maddening habit of wanting something only until she’d got it, at which point she wanted something else.

what could be nobler than dedicating it to the happiness and fulfillment of another?

A second note next to it read Q-TIPS!!!

The more you learn, thought Alice, the more you realize how little you know.

Plenty of life is memorable only in flashes, if at all.

You can tell when someone is unbedeviled by time.

I asked Maddie whether it wasn’t possible that she did not, in fact, recall the actual moment in which she asked these questions, but rather whether her mother had told her the story so many times that it had retroactively acquired the status of a memory in her mind.

cannot be certain whether if there were no photograph there would be no memory.

in that most uncomfortable position for non-yoga-practicing adults: cross-legged on the floor.

the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.

After all, humility and silence are surely preferable to ignorance and imperiousness.

You went to the moon, one of my uncles’ friends reminded me, when he learned I was American. We know you could fix this if you really wanted to.

We ride too high on deceptive notions of power and security and control and then when it all comes crashing down on us the low is made deeper by the high.