Eventually these encounters forced him to acknowledge the reality of fate, and the truth inherent in things of the imagination.
You can’t burgulate a forgotten, empty house, he said, horrified at my stupidity.
We in Purgatory sing fondly of Hell.
War is ninety percent myth anyway, isn’t it? In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don’t we, and we constantly invoke our God. It’s got to be about somethin...
Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church's grotesque pe...
There was nothing of his I wanted in particular. I wanted it all.
The three of us had formed a group based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn’t yet come to light, and so we kept on in one another’s company, going to bars and having convers...
The scene before her flattened, lost one of its dimensions, and the noise dribbled irrelevantly down its face. Something was coming. This moment, this very experience of it, seemed only the thinnest g...
The first time I didn’t say anything, because she shot me in the mouth.
Sooner or later the mind grasps at a thought and follows it into the labyrinth, one thought branching into another. Then the labyrinth caves in on itself and you find yourself outside. You were never...
Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wis...
Now Van Ness claimed already to have died, more than once, in various other universes. Who can refute that? Is there any proof otherwise? Imagine a slight revision in Nietzsche’s myth of eternal retur...
It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.
It seemed the two held forth on parallel tracks, confident of meeting somewhere in infinity.
If I opened up your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might turn you into someone like that.
I know everything. Heinz sputtered and fumed somewhat like an automobile himself, and said, I’m God! Grainier thought about how to answer. Here seemed a conversation that could go no farther.
His elbows cracked loudly when he straightened his arms, and something hitched and snapped in his right shoulder when he moved it the wrong way; a general stiffness of his frame worked itself out by h...
Her midriff bare, like the denizen...of some pampering seraglio.
He didn’t like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings.
Grainier still went to services some rare times, when a trip to town coincided. People spoke nicely to him there, people recognized him from the days when he'd attended almost regularly with Gladys, b...