As much as I enjoyed her company I was slightly uneasy in her presence; not because of any lack of charm of kindness on her part, but because of a too-strong wish to impress her on mine,
As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how.
Aristotle says in the Poetics, said Henry, that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art. And I believe Aristotle is correct. After...
Are you going somewhere? I said, regarding him timidly. The suit made him seem a different person, less melancholy and distracted, more capable—unlike the Hobie of my first visit, with his bedraggled...
Anyways, the secret is, always fix their attention *away* from where the slippery stuff's going on. That's the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it.
Another thing I figured out, after a few days in the house on Desert End Road: what Xandra and my dad really meant when they said my dad had stopped drinking was that he’d switched from Scotch (his be...
Andy had been good to me when I had no one else. The least I could do was be kind to his mother and sister. It didn’t occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I’d roused...
And-maybe it’s ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn’t matter since no one’s ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the h...
And that was fine. I didn’t matter much in the scheme of things and Martin didn’t either. We were easily forgotten. It was a social and moral lesson, if nothing else. But for all foreseeable time to c...
And someplace, if there is a place where lists are kept, and credit given, I am sure there is a gold star by his name.
And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that’s nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.
And if what she’d wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she’d known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.
And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind...
An invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swarm untroubled in Baltic Waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the s...
All those years I’d drifted along too glassy and insulated for any kind of reality to push through: a delirium which had spun me along on its slow, relaxed wave since childhood, high and lying on the...
All of the above.
After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day
A wine-colored welt of scar tissue had bubbled up in the little stab hole; it was interesting to look at, like a small blob of pink glue, and it reminded her in a good way of Lawrence of Arabia, burni...
A guesstimate? prompted the man Enrique. About your dad? Ballpark will do, the Korean lady said.
A goodbye at the gate, said Hobie. He seemed to be talking partly to himself. That's what he would have wanted. The parting glimpse, the death haiku - he wouldn't have liked to leave without stopping...