Sexy means loving someone you donot know.

She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.

...that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.

We are all #humans and we all make #mistakes. We #hurt people even if we don't want to.

I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, "Listen to me."

Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table.