They looked ruined and decrepit, the sort of men who'd soon turn into empty chairs.
There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten s...
Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.
The world spinning. AUTHOR’S NOTE PHILIPPE PETIT WALKED A TIGHTROPE WIRE between the World Trade Center towers on August 7, 1974. I have used his walk in this novel, but all the other events and chara...
The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip u...
The truth of the matter is that the light at the end of the tunnel generally belongs to the pharmaceutical companies.
The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.
The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.
The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don’t go.
The disconnect between his mouth and his mind. That's where the camera came in. It was the unspoken thing between him and the others.
Listening to these people is like listening to trees—sooner or later the tree is sliced open and the watermarks reveal their age.
It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine.
In Florida, her father had once said at dinner: I like Negroes, yessir. I think everyone should own one. She had stormed from the table and stayed in her room for two days. Her dinner was slid under t...
I was a raw, quiet child, and God was already a bore to me.
I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The r...
I can still to this day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a dime, maybe things could begin and...
How long ago it was and how strange, but all dead friends come to life again sometimes.
How far from real the truth is. I wanted then to take every murdering bastard in Northern Ireland, and have them sleep for a night in my boy's blue rowboat, out on the lough, in the dark, among the re...
His face had softened: as if just being a moment with her had relaxed him, allowed him to be someone different. I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the...
Her smile colud've broen glass.