Minie balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before WW1. p128
MIGHT HAVE LIKED Xandra in other circumstances—which, I guess, is sort of like saying I might have liked the kid who beat me up if he hadn’t beat me up.
Il quadro mi ha anche insegnato che possiamo comunicare l’un l’altro a distanza di secoli. E sento di avere qualcosa di molto serio e urgente da dirti, mio inesistente lettore, e sento che devo dirtel...
I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all.
I never took it out...though even when I couldn't see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness th...
I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story.
He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders; bending low, he put his lips close to the nape of her neck. How about a kiss for your jailbird brother? he said.She turned halfway, as if to...
For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I’d lost with my mother. Everything about her was a snowstorm of fascin...
EVER SINCE BORIS HAD shown up with the bruised eye, I had built Boris’s father up in my mind to be some thick-necked Soviet with pig eyes and a buzz haircut. In fact—as I was surprised to see, when I...
Does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end--and yet to know as well, despite all this, as...
I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad no...
...life - whatever else it is - is short... maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while ke...
«La morte è la madre della bellezza» disse Henry. «E cos'è la bellezza?» «Terrore.»
Yet isn’t it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn’t quite work, that’s oddly the dearest?
It was a clear night, with crickets and a million stars
It felt adult, sophisticated, slightly alcoholic.
Good-natured groom on
Defensively.
You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever.