Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don’t understand money anymore. Money is...
Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves...
Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.
Jessie was trying to read science fiction but nothing she read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet, she said, for sheer unimaginableness.
It’s the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response—not regret so much as a sense of time’s own e...
It’s like we've been flung back in time, he said. Here we are in the Stone Age, knowing all these great things after centuries of progress but what can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers? C...
It was the best kind of class to have in the afternoon, an exercise in almost pure language, demanding nothing more than fractional consciousness since there wasn't the slightest hope of understanding...
It was necessary because she needed to do it. This is what made it necessary.
It was May of my senior year at Leighton Gage and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we sat in an air-conditioned hourglass and savored our own total incomprehension as an assistant professor charted...
It seems that danger assigns to public voices the responsibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come r...
It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivi...
It is only me, the body in the shower, one person enclosed in plastic watching a drop of water skate down the wet curtain. The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It is a m...
Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without...
Is there a fungus that speaks to you? I'm serious. People hear things. They hear God.He meant it. He was serious. He wanted to mean it, to hear anything the man might say, the wholeshapeless narrative...
Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.
Ingram did an echocardiogram. Eric was on his back, with a skewed view of the monitor, and wasn't sure whether he was watching a computerized mapping of his heart or a picture of the thing itself. It...
In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beg...
If Greek and Latin characters are paving stones, Arabic is rain.
I've heard about a man and woman who are walking the length of the Great Wall of China, approaching each other from opposite directions. Every time I think of them, I see them from above., with the Wa...
I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask your...