We Need To Talk About Kevin

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least.

—ERMA BOMBECK

This is the one place in the world where the ramifications of my life are fully felt, and it’s far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.

Which is just where my story takes place. I seem finally to be learning what you were always trying to teach me, that my own country is as exotic and even as perilous as Algeria.

A child needs your love most when he deserves it least.

—ERMA BOMBECK

She would sacrifice herself to this one glorious gorging, consequences be damned.

. And there’s a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything

There is an enormous difference between disliking yourself and simply not wanting to be here

something in me, all night, every night, is waiting for you to come home

But I drew the line when you despaired that Celia was “clingy.” It’s an ugly word, isn’t it, that describes the honey of the heart as a sticky, pestersome substance that won’t brush off.

the trouble seems rooted in the nature of beauty itself, a surprisingly elusive quality and rarely one you can buy outright. It flees in the face of too much effort. It rewards casualness, and most of all it deigns to arrive by whim, by accident