The world was a series of fleeting gratifications.
The words were old and true, full of reassurance, comfort, consolation. Men followed such words to their death because other men before them had done the same, and perhaps it was easier to die than ad...
The white marble surface was inlaid with semiprecious stones in seamless floral designs and in chaste calligraphy, shaped stones, jeweled stones, delicate and free-figured. The surface ran cool and sm...
The term itself—my life—is a desperate overstatement.
The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.
The grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening.
The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What
That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.
That night, after the movie, driving my father's car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream.
Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.
She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.Eric Packer about Vija Kinski
Rain turned to sleet, sleet to snow.
Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killing...
It's all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people...
It is the neon epic of Saturday night.
In a country that’s in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance.
If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought, he said, the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.
I would think of it with affection because of its scenes of fragmentary beauty, because it brought men closer together through their perversity and fear, because it enabled us to pretend that death co...
I understood that he did not see the person he was talking to. He had the drifter's inclination to be impervious to names and faces. These were interchangeable components room to room, country to coun...
I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.