Charles Baxter

“As is proper, the children — all grown — have left home. We have three. The oldest, our beautiful daughter Sarah, is, like her mother, a biochemist. She is successful but, so far, unmarried. She would be a handful for any man. I mean this as praise and description. The middle one, Ephraim, is a mathematician and father to three wonderful little ones, our grandchildren. I have pictures here somewhere. Of the youngest, Aaron, who is crazy, I should not speak. And not because he blames me for the mess in his head. No: he deserves to be left alone with his commonplace lunacies — he calls them ideas — and given peace. He lives in Los Angeles.”

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“I have to admit it: the business gave me a boost. I liked having a place to go in the morning. I liked having a purpose. I liked arriving there before the mall had opened. It’s what you might call a dawn feeling. No doubt there is a word for this in German. Every day is a new day when filled with dawn feeling, a virgin day, until it gets fucked up by human activity and becomes history.”

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“That’s all I am going to say about the subject for now. As Chloe says, some things don’t bear much looking into. If you want something to read, then read the white space on the rest of this page. That’s me, down there in the white.”

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“I thought he was kind of beautiful. I liked thinking about him. My tastes had changed. My concept of male beauty had altered: he was now the definition of it. ... I had shorts on, too. My legs were prettier than they’d been a month or so before. Smoother and nicer-looking. I don’t know why. They just were. Oh, actually I do know why: he loved them.”

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“Neil Diamond’s Song Sung Blue was blaring over these internment-camp speakers, and I was sitting there with my head in my hands wondering what I was doing in Jackson, Michigan. The colors on the water were turning from magenta to a sort of hot pink, and I was having this insight that my parents had let me loose in the world without explaining anything of importance to me.”

- Excerpts from The Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter