I am starting a collection of only right-hand gloves. It’s ever so bourgeois to have two.

Your mother and I do not approve of drinking. Have you not heard of the Eighteenth Amendment?” “Prohibition? I drink to its health whenever I can.

We're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works - groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless - have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.

All the small, simple, conscious acts of living a sudden defense against the dying we do every day.

With each shimmy, the bugle beads on their scandalously revealing costumes swung and shook. It was the sort of display Evie knew her mother would have found appalling—an example of the moral decay of the young generation. It was sexual and dangerous and thrilling, and Evie wanted more of it.

Just once, she'd like to be the exciting one, the girl somebody wanted.

We have work to do if you are not to be a total failure like high-waisted, acid-wash jeans.