Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you're a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not.
What makes this city different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board. People are swep...
What do we have to live for, but each other. What do we have to die for, but our love?
What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? What’s a hacking jacket? They’ve grown comfortable with their money, I said. They genuine...
Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?
War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.
This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them.
Think of two parallel lines. […] One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a thir...
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamily self-aware, the submicroscopic m...
That's great. Tell me about it. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography. The beginning of the end.
Sometimes it takes an entire morning to outlive a dream, to outwake a dream.
Some people don't believe in God but they color eggs at Easter just to change the pattern of their days.
Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be. This did not happen to me until I met (your mother). One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation.
She missed the autumn weekends at somebody's country house, leaf-fall and touch football, kids tumbling down grassy slopes, leaders and followers, all watched by a pair of tall slender dogs poised on...
She means everything literally. Don't kid yourself about that lady. She means everything literally.
Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.
Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not. [...] To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space. This is how we advan...
Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know tha...
People tend to forget they are patients. Once they leave the doctor’s office or the hospital, they simply put it out of their minds. But you are all permanent patients, like it or not. I am the doctor...
People had hoped to be caught up in something bigger than themselves. They thought it would be a shared crisis. They would feel a sense of shared purpose, shared destiny. Like a snowstorm that blanket...