I was thinking that a life is just the history of what we give our attention to,’ said Patrick. ‘The rest is packaging.
I just have to get rid of this piece of glass,' said Anne. 'I guess something broke here earlier?''It was me,' said Patrick.
Eleanor had watched her mother’s persecution with the same vivid silence as she experienced in the face of her own gradual disintegration tonight.
Could one have a time-release epiphany, an epiphany without realizing it had happened? Or were they always trumpeted by angels and preceded by temporary blindness, Patrick wondered, as he walked down...
At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.
With her curling blond hair and her slender limbs and her beautiful clothes, Inez was alluring in an obvious way, and yet it was easy enough to see that her slightly protruding blue eyes were blank sc...
The Talking Heads pulsed from every speaker. ‘The centre is missing,’ gasped David Byrne, and Patrick could not help agreeing with him. How did they know exactly what he was feeling? It was spooky.
Thanks for putting that in terms I can easily grasp,’ said Malcolm, without showing the patronizing bitch the slightest sign of irony.
She was ghastly and quite mad, but when I grew up I figured her worst punishment was to be herself and I didn't have to do anything more.
She tried to walk more slowly up the hill. God, her mind was racing, racing in neutral,
She had brushed her teeth before vomiting as well, never able to utterly crush the optimistic streak in her nature.
Patrick’s own nanny was dead. A friend of his mother’s said she had gone to heaven, but Patrick had been there and knew perfectly well that they had put her in a wooden box and dropped her in a hole....
Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not believing a word of it, as he sweated his way through the feeling that he was dying of fear. People died of feelings all the time, once they...
Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in o...
If you were madly in love, you’d want me to win,’ said Katherine.‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ said Sam. ‘I think love is about equality: both of us equally happy with either result. One-sided self-sacr...
How could he relax his guard when beams of neurotic energy, like searchlights weaving about a prison compound, allowed no thought to escape, no remark to go unchecked.
Anne came downstairs wearing a white cotton dress almost indistinguishable from the white cotton nightgown she had taken off.
There's a blast of palpable stupidity that comes from our host, like opening the door of a sauna. The best way to contradict him is to let him speak.
She imagined vodka poured over ice and all the cubes that had been frosted turning clean and collapsing in the glass and the ice cracking, like a spine in the hands of a confident osteopath.
Presumably those who enjoyed inflicting cruelty could hardly believe their luck and set about popularizing the superstition that their victims could only achieve peace of mind by forgiving them.’ ‘You