We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them.
They told me that nothing was a sin, just a poor life choice. Poor impulse control. That nothing is evil. Any concept of right versus wrong, according to them, is merely a cultural construct relative...
It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.
I feel my heart ache, but I've forgotten what that feeling means.
Hoard food and it rots. Hoard money and you rot. Hoard power and the nation rots.
Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.
I knew this would happen, Marla says. You're such a flake. You love me. You ignore me. You save my life, then you cook my mother into soap.
The worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you'll realize you only lived on paper. Your only adventures were make-believe, and while th...
The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a...
La historia no es más que una sucesión de monstruos o de víctimas. O de testigos.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?
The most boring scenes are the scenes where a character is alone.
What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, bu...
No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart...
Your dad was in a street gang? My adopted dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. Him, me, and my adopted mom lived in the suburbs in an English Tudor house with a gigantic basement w...
People in France have a phrase: Spirit of the Stairway. In French: Esprit de l'escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer, but it's too late. Say you're at a party and someone insults you...
I am the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.
My secret wish is right now to be romancing this dead girl. A dead girl. Any dead girl. I'm not what you'd call choosy.
We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language.