Our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?
Melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
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...
Light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
Just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.
It may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that’s nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again
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.
It better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?
His subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat
He said well if you can’t plan it out ahead of time, you’ll just have to work it out as you go along
Harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.
Hard to believe that the world had ended and yet somehow these ridiculous activities kept grinding on.
Good doesn't always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Even the wise and good cannot see the end of all actions.
Futile
Exactly that girl, not the prettiest, but the no-makeup and kind of ordinary-looking girl he’d chosen to be happy
But it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light.
Back there or maybe even taken an actual shit, and then tried to cover it up with a bunch of coconut air freshener that smelled like suntan lotion. The seats were greasy, and patched with duct tape, a...
Aware that Allison’s eyes were on him, stepped backwards and began instead to swivel his lower body in an oddly lascivious and adult-looking little dance.
And sharp-faced, like Boris, but with an evil red-rimmed gaze and tiny, brownish sawteeth. He made me think of a rabid fox.
A few hours could change everything – or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.