Plateau of pleasure and pain

And then he would turn me over and begin to massage me, his fingers made of some kind of steel, and like the cracker and digger used to splay open a lobster his hands dug in.  The muscles of my back and neck and legs slid apart, and even my feet seemed to spread like the bones of a fan... Most everything was beyond words, in a plateau of pleasure and pain that lifted out the tongue and stomped it on the floor.

p. 193, A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore, Dec. 2010

Accumulated misfortune

I was reduced.  I was barely there.  When misfortune accumulated, I could feel now, it strafed you to the thinness of a nightgown, sheared you to the sheerness of a slip.  Light seemed to shine right through your very hands, your blood no longer red:  your skin in the breeze billowing, like a jellyfish.

p. 260, A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore, Dec. 2010

Sitting gloriously in the ruins

Adoption, I could see, was a lot like childbirth:  Here she is! everyone exclaimed.  And you looked and saw a pickled piglet and felt nothing, not realizing it would be the only time you would ever feel nothing again.  A baby destroyed a life and thereby became the very best thing in it.  Though to sit gloriously and triumphantly in ruins may not be such a big trick.

p. 121, A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore, Dec. 2010

He fell on the floor

When I was younger I could get away with not eating something I didn't like by claiming to my parents either that it was too rich or that it had fallen on the floor.  (Later, I would use this with people:  "She was too rich" or "He fell on the floor -- what is there to say?")

p. 107, A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore, Dec. 2010