There are those of us who haven't yet told our stories, or refuse to tell them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shell or the shock - perhaps I mu...
The smell of the earth, so astoundingly fresh: it strikes Brown like a thing he might eat. His ears throb. His body feels as if it is still moving through the air. He is, he thinks, the first man ever...
The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.The person we know at first, [she thinks] is not the one we know at last.
Rather, it was the manshape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary.
Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.
It was that time of the century when the idea of a gentleman had almost become myth. The Great War had concussed the world. The unbearable news of sixteen million deaths rolled off the great metal dru...
Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.
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 wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in d...
Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.
She might not have been party to love, but it still took a lot of volume to fill a life.
It was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.
It struck me that maybe the young girl had just been a prostitute. I felt a momentary sigh of gratitude, and then the awareness stopped me cold, the walls pulsed in on me. How cheap was I?
What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could findin the grime of the everyday...he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he...
She had that emigrant’s sadness—she would never go back to her old country—it was gone in more senses than one—but she was forever gazing homewards anyway.
Outside, the dark brushed the city and the wind unleashed the snow
Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.
Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. Hewent where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. Hetook little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt,...
A priest? I said. --A monk or some such. One of those worker guys. Liberation theowhateveritis. --Theologian, said the other. --One of those guys who thinks that Jesus was on welfare.