Experience of love is that you get excited thinking that someone can mend your broken heart, and then you get angry when you realize that they can’t. A certain economy creeps into the process and the...
His conscience, like a sunburnt scorpion, was stinging itself to death.
Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars...
She always said, ‘I know you like this,’ which was a lie, because he had told her he didn’t the last time.
Words are our slaves: they may be used to fetch a pair of slippers, or to build the great pyramid of Giza: they depend on syntax to make the order of the world manifest, to raise stones into arches an...
After less than a year together they now slept in separate rooms because Victor's snoring, and nothing else about him, kept her awake at night.
All she remembered was that Caligula had planned to torture his wife to find out why he was so devoted to her. What was David’s excuse, she wondered.
And then the old exhortations would come out: observe everything…trust nobody…despise your mother…effort is vulgar…things were better in the eighteenth century.
The Queen was saying only the other day that London property prices are so high that she doesn’t know how she’d cope without Buckingham Palace,’ Princess Margaret explained to a sympathetic Peter Porl...
At the same time, his past lay before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.
Was this the triumph of self-knowledge: to suffer more lucidly?
But that's what the English mean, isn't it, when they say, He was very philosophical about it? They mean that someone stopped thinking about something.
Other people knew what they were meant to say, knew what they were meant to mean, and other people still - otherer people - knew what the other people meant when they said it.
He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of color landing on a page.
He had only just made the Elysian deadline; hanging onto the typescript until the last moment in case there was something still to be done; two sentences turned into one, one sentence broken into two,...
The two men left the building with a sense of achievement, counterbalanced by desire.
He thought of one of the guiding mottoes of his father’s life: ‘Never apologize, never explain.
Rome wasn’t deconstructed in a day.
Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.
Unlike the riotous appetites of adolescence, his present cravings had a tragic tinge, they were cravings for the appetites, metacravings, wanting to want.
Showing 41 to 60 of 137 results