The line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.
Real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from...
This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biolog...
Though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
Since we’d both been through so many of the same things, she and I, and we were an awful lot alike—too much. And because we’d both been hurt so badly, so early on, in violent and irremediable ways tha...
He was about as erotic as an old football coach.
What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted--? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health...
Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that...
It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.
I mean, this man was not /Voltaire/ we killed.
For humans-trapped in biology-there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or los...
BEFORE BORIS, I HAD borne my solitude stoically enough, without realizing quite how alone I was.
And yet she was wholly herself: a rarity.
…he said, in the most melancholy voice, ‘She’s hiding from me.’ He was dreaming, of course. I thought it was rather sweet. So, to humour him, I said, ‘Well, then. You must hide your eyes and count to...
Affectionate exasperated breath I knew
Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the...
Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever.
I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond
It seemed the best thing was just to come right out and say it. 'You know,' I said, 'I'm really not attracted to you. I mean, not that -''Isn't that interesting,' he said coolly. 'I'm really not attra...
It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.