Open your eyes, you idiot, I wanted to say. This woman is a shark. She’s from a different world, a different species. There’s something way fucking wrong here. Instead: Harry, my gut tends to be prett...
Now death was a place, a place to which people disappeared forever when they died, a place that gradually sucked away the clarity of memory afterward for a similar one-way journey.
No aru taka wa, tsume o kakusu, as the Japanese saying goes. The hawk with talent hides its talons.
I’ve gotten used to hoping for so little that I seem to have lost any natural immunity to the emotion’s infection.
It’s funny to consider how important things like that felt to me then. Proving people wrong. Fighting stupidity. Wanting formal recognition. It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong i...
It’s been my experience that people who can express their political views only in clichés and passionate generalizations are fanatics.
Is there any teacher better, more patient, more determined than fate?
Is she your first girlfriend? I asked, my tone gentle. I told you, she’s not really my girlfriend, he said, ducking the question. If she’s occupying enough of your attention to keep you in bed until t...
In the twenty-first century, people threw off data like dead skin cells.
If you want something you’ve never had before, you have to do something you’ve never done before.
If you knew at the outset what you understood at the end, would you make the same choices, take the same risks, accept the same sacrifices? No. No one would. You can’t appreciate the weight of that bu...
If there was one thing Snake knew about people, it was that once they got attached to a theory, it was hard to get them detached. They’d screen out unhelpful facts, invent favorable ones, and ignore c...
I wondered if she had bought the story. If she hadn’t thanked Harry for his response, I would have known she hadn’t bought it, because she was classy and it wouldn’t have been like her not to respond....
I was taken aback by his gumption. He sounded more petulant than afraid. I realized this kid didn’t understand the kind of trouble he was in. If he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know I would have to...
I was surprised at how much the genuine clothes made me feel like a monk. I would remember that—that the details mattered, not just in how you looked, but in how you felt, in the kind of unconscious v...
I was impressed, although unsurprised. She was obviously in the habit of thinking operationally, and was as matter-of-fact about it as she was effective. I’d already concluded she was trained. To that...
I waited a moment, then lowered myself, cross-legged, to the earth. Some of the graves were adorned with flowers, in various stages of freshness and decay. As though the dead could smell the bouquets.
I resolved to never again be unprepared for the shit hitting the fan. I would pay attention to small things—the way people dressed and spoke and walked. The things that made them part of a background...
I miss her. God, I do. It’s beyond missing; it’s a kind of mourning. And not just for everything we had, but for everything we might have had, could have had, if only I had made other choices, if only...
I learned a long time ago not to trust, that faith is to life what sticking your chin out is to boxing.