Yet he [Levon] somehow sings with the wounded humanity of a man without a tribe, a man who has known both love and grief and understands that one is the price of the other.
To yearn for ignorance is to embrace the wishful thinking of a child. For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop.
He committed such a heinous act, would have owned up to it and taken his punishment like a man, as the archaic phrase goes. That may be a quaint and sexist notion these days, but some of what is best...
Hair. He’s bald now. But he still looks like he could ride a bull ragged. I jump at the sound of the garage door. Mom gives me a little wave, then crosses the kitchen as silently as if she were floati...
You said you had enough evidence to convict Jonathan Sands of money laundering on your own. That’s correct. I’d like to see that evidence. I’d like a chocolate chip cookie without the chips. Mr. Cage—
You know, the truth isn’t hard to find, if you’re willing to get your hands dirty. Truth waits just under the surface for any man brave enough to scrape a little dirt away. But most people are too afr...
Where are you going? Quentin asks. To do my job. You need to start thinking about whether you’ve got what it takes to do yours. Hey, don’t— I slam the door and hurry down the hall. The Brightside Mano...
Thought like that showed me the needless ambiguity of words like space-time. The average person heard a word like that and figured he'd never understand it. But it was so simple. Every place you ever...
There’s no universal tally of good and evil, balancing right and wrong. The Christians with their God-has-a-plan fantasy, the Hindus with their karmic balance . . . it’s all wishful thinking. Primitiv...
There it was, the choice I’d confronted so often in life: the path of least resistance, or the walk over hot coals.
There have been times I would have given anything for such faith, for the belief that divine justice exists somewhere in the universe. Facing Sarah’s death without it was an existential baptism of fir...
The system is broken! And one of the reasons it’s broken down here is that it’s largely run by and for black people. They simply do not place a high cultural value on education, and I’m not going to p...
Only in the shadow of death do we sense the true velocity of time—while adrenaline blasts through our systems, eternity becomes tangible and all else blurs into background.
Old Shelby said something interesting about facts: ‘People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.
Oh. Does Mississippi have some kind of grave-desecration statute? I know they differ from state to state. Mississippi does, thank God. Anybody who comes across human remains in this state must report...
Mom covers the wrought-iron patio table with newspaper, and Dad dumps the steaming crawfish
Mississippi blood is different. It’s got some river in it. Delta soil, turpentine, asbestos, cotton poison. But there’s strength in it, too. Strength that’s been beat but not broke.
If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.
He had never seen such eyes before, not even in the faces of soldiers unmanned in the midst of great carnage. Eyes like black mirrors, at once shallow and bottomless. He had the feeling that if he pre...
Given the nature of the mind, we’ll consider the dreams of sleep to be the past, never quite accurate in recollection, always made to serve our desires (except when haunting us for our sins). And the...