She’d pressed her forehead to the window and saw clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. The beauty of it, the loneliness, the thought of al...
Montreal was less than two inches to the north.
It is sometimes necessary to break everything.
If you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importan...
I repent nothing,
Hell is the absence of the people you long for. 24 ON THEIR SECOND DAY without the Symphony, Kirsten and August came upon a line of cars, queued along the shoulder of the road. It was late morning and...
Because survival is insufficient,
Überleben allein ist unzureichend
Paper fell out of the book. It was a page torn from
It is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.
You know where I'm from, he said, and she understood what he meant by this. Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in...
You know what bothered me about it? Everyone was supposedly committed to the pursuit of truth and beauty, or at least one of those things, but no one was actually doing anything about it, and it seeme...
You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever.
You don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’re going.
They call themselves the light. What about it? If you are the light, she said, then your enemies are darkness, right? I suppose. If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothin...
There was a school here now, in Concourse C. Like educated children everywhere, the children in the airport school memorized abstractions: the airplanes outside once flew through the air. You could us...
There had been countries, and borders. It was hard to explain. In
There are children on the island who go barefoot all summer and wear feathers in their hair, the Volkswagen vans in which their parents arrived in the ’70s turning to rust in the forest. Every year th...
The revelation of privacy: she can walk down the street and absolutely no one knows who she is. It's possible that no one who didn't grow up in a small place can understand how beautiful this is, how...
The night sky was brighter than it had been. On the clearest nights the stars were a cloud of light across the breadth of the sky, extravagant in their multitudes . . . The era of light pollution had...