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 jolt of fear had burned all the red out of my blood.
The first time I didn’t say anything, because she shot me in the mouth.
The feeling that he was afraid of me was invigorating.
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...
She knew: shit, we might as well have been drinking a dog’s tears. Nothing mattered except that we were alive.
Now the colonel seemed to grieve for his President again, because he said, This world spits out a beautiful man like he was poison.
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...
No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.
Night again, the insects are loud, the moths are killing themselves on the lamp. Two hours ago I sat on the veranda looking out at the dusk, filled with envy for each living entity—bird, bug, blossom,...
I’d thought something was required of me, but I hadn’t wanted to find out what it was.
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 was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere.
It seemed the two held forth on parallel tracks, confident of meeting somewhere in infinity.
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.
Howling, are you? the Indian said. There it is for you, then. That’s what happens, that’s what they say: There’s not a wolf alive that can’t tame a man.
His eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop.
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.
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...