I knew him, this John Smith. Once at a party he tried to sell me a gun, and later at the same party he made everyone quiet down for a few minutes because I was singing along with the radio, and he lik...
I knew every raindrop by its name.
For many minutes before she showed herself, he felt her moving around the place. He detected her presence as unmistakably as he would have sensed the shape of someone blocking the light through a wind...
First I put my lips to her upper lip, then to the bottom of her pout, and then I kissed her fully, my mouth on her open mouth, and we met inside.
But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in...
But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or completely horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me.
A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine.
Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned through. If...
When we stopped in front of it and turned off the engine, we heard music coming from inside—jazz. It sounded sophisticated and lonely. We
News had reached his ears that they planned to distribute mixtures alongside Route One and Route Twenty-two to kill the vegetation there. Depriving ambushers of cover was a good idea, he thought. But...
Memories assailed him of how gently she had spoken, touched, and moved; of how she'd loved him fiercely despite his mistakes and obsessions and weaknesses. And the conviction descended on him that lov...
If he died now, Grainier probably wouldn't know it until they came into the light of the gas lamps either side of the doctor's house. After they'd moved along for nearly an hour without conversation,...
If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I’d certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time.
I wandered over across the hall where they were showing a short movie about vasectomies. Much later I told her that I'd actually gotten a vasectomy a long time ago, and somebody else must have gotten...
I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself. Because boldness doesn't feel bold. It feels scared not brave.
Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history. There’d been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains. The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted c...
FH: All these... weirdos, and me... getting a little better every day right in the middle of 'em. I had never known... I had never even imagined for a heartbeat that... there might be a place in the w...
As he expressed these ideas he followed them with his eyes, watching them gallop away to the place where they made sense.
All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dreamlike business he’d ever witnessed waking—the brilliant pastels of the last light overhead, some clouds h...
You know there is a cycle of imagining and desire, desire and death, death and birth, birth and imagining. And we have been tempted into its mouth. And it has swallowed us.