Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they’d had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip....
Three years is a long time. It is to us. But in the scheme of things—not at all. I mean, said Andy reasonably, look at some poor dumb bunny like Sabine Ingersoll or that idiot James Villiers. Forrest...
Three coffees, two with milk, please, said Francis to the fat woman behind the counter. No milk, just Cremora. Well, then, just black, I guess. He turned to us. Have you seen the paper this morning?
They were a pair of white mice, I thought—only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor....
They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.
They took the wrong ones! Mistake was made! Everything is unfair! Who do we complain to, in this shitty place? Who is in charge here?]
There’s a pattern and we’re a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed...
The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.
The walls billowed with printed fabric—yellow, green, indigo, purple—and a red hammer-and-sickle flag hung over the batik-draped mattress. It was as if a Russian cosmonaut had crashed in the jungle an...
The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.' He took one last drag of this cigarette and put it out. 'Quite simply,' he said, 'we didn't believe. And belief...
The thing to remember, said Dave, the psychiatrist who had been assigned to me by the city, is that you’ll be taken care of no matter what. He was a thirtyish guy with dark clothes and trendy eyeglass...
The silence between us was happy and strange, connected by the cord and the icy voices thinly echoing. You don’t have to talk, she said. If you don’t feel like it. Her eyelids were heavy and her voice...
The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he’s worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerf...
The chronological sorting of memories is an interesting business. Prior to this first weekend in the country, my recollections of that fall are distant and blurry: from here on out, they come into a s...
The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws—this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos. Easy to see w...
That is to say: I wanted to maintain the illusion that their dealings with me were completely straightforward; that we were all friends, and no secrets, though the plain fact of it was that there were...
Talvolta, nel caso di un incidente, quando l'evento è troppo improvviso e strano per essere compreso, il surreale prende il sopravvento. Le azioni procedono al rallentatore, come in un sogno, fotogram...
THINGS WOULD HAVE TURNED out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when I was a kid; and though everything that’s happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I l...
Still with real greatness, there’s a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn’t matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It’s the same line. Fall...
Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you live yours.