Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrapy your mind around that you had to shake your head in...
But it was only genius if you thought of it first. A teacher told him that. Genius is lonely.
A brand-new thought: She tests the phrase, scratching it out on the paper, over and over, The distance finally broken.
The way he spoke was magical, but after a while even his voice began to grate and he began to remind me of the colors of the walls in the hotel rooms in which he stayed...
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.
They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.
They looked ruined and decrepit, the sort of men who'd soon turn into empty chairs.
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 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 air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before.
She has come to stay, to be with Claire for a day or two. To sleep in the spare room. To accompany her dying, the same way she accompanied Gloria's dying six years ago. The slow car journey back to Mi...
People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self.
Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.
Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn't have been there, and I wasn't there, but I'll tell you anyways: once upon a time and long ago...
Most of the customers were from Kerry and Limerick. One was a lawyer, a tall, fat sandy-haired man. He lorded it over the others by buying them drinks. They clinked glasses with him and called him a '...
Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
Listening to these people is like listening to trees—sooner or later the tree is sliced open and the watermarks reveal their age.
It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.