The pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.
Still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life.
Liked the idea of living in a city — any city, especially a strange one — liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of sol...
Jeans jacket, catching him in a chokehold, pistol at
It was a clear night, with crickets and a million stars
It didn’t matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie’s had recently gone for. An object—any object—was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it.
Even when I leaned in as far as I dared without being obvious,
Else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not
Defensively.
Basketball courts ringed with barbed-wire fence.
A light that made me think of long hours in dusty libraries, and old books, and silence.
You know that thing Julian used to say,' said Francis. 'Which thing?''About a Hindu saint being able to slay a thousand on the battlefield and it not being a sin unless he felt remorse.
You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.
With the news about Andy, it was like someone had thrown an x-ray switch and reversed everything into photographic negative, so that even with the daffodils and the dogwalkers and the traffic cops whi...
With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers-laziness? Habit...
Who knew it was in my power to make anyone so happy? Or that I could ever be so happy myself? My moods were a slingshot; after being locked-down and anesthetized for years my heart was zinging and sla...
What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes a...
Weren’t we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?
Welty’s instruction; that I’d had a concussion. That I hadn’t
Well, she doesn’t have anything to do with it, Richard, you’re just like that guy in ‘Dragnet’ that always wants the facts.