And two men standing up top, weeping like children because they’d somehow never known the world could get this bad.
And she was so simply his love, his girl, watching him approach as if she were memorizing him and his walk and those flowers and this moment, and he wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it b...
Work and its results always outlived those who labored at it as any Egyptian slave-ghost will tell you.
When she found his eyes, hers were fuller and sharper, lit with something that had entered the world centuries before civilized things. I get off at midnight, she said.
We’re not our brother’s keeper, Joseph. In fact, it’s an insult to our brother to presume he can’t take care of himself.
We age as the rest of the world watches, she thought, but somehow we’re the last to know.
There's darkness in this world you can't learn about by watching TV and reading books.
The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.
Rumors or no, Thomas, if the men strike, we'll see fecal gravity at work like never before. Ain't a man in this room who won't be covered in shit.
Monsters don't dress like monsters; they dress like humans. Even stranger, they rarely know they're the monsters.
It had happened before she was born, this wholesale discarding of American industry, this switch from a culture that made things of value to a culture that consumed things of dubious merit. She’d grow...
I know you. I've known you my whole life. I've been waiting. Waiting for you to make an appearance. Waiting all these years.I knew you in the womb.
He wanted to go on for hours. He wanted someone to listen to him and to understand that speech wasn't just about communicating ideas or opinions. Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human l...
Grief, I swear to God, doesn't live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I want to do is cut off my nose so I can't smell her, hack my fingers off at the joint.
And that’s when it hit me. Like a building had fallen on me. The oxygen in my chest swirled into a vortex created by a single instant of horrifying clarity.
After my daughter was born, I’d considered buying a shotgun to ward off potential suitors fourteen or so years up the road. Now, as I listened to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking...
They had become the people her parents worked for. But they were better versions. And her parents, hungry as they were, would have expected no less. You couldn’t fight the Haves. The only thing you co...
Conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority.
You was in all sorts of places, huh? Yeah, I was. Saw the world. What’d you think of it? Different languages, same shit.
You think the whole electrical system is fried? Chuck said, Good possibility. That would mean fences. Chuck picked up an apple as it floated onto his foot. He went into a windup and kicked his leg and...