There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, whe...
She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?
She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction be...
She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will.
She loved him, though not at this particular moment.
She lit up as she descended the stairs to the hall, knowing that she would not have dared had her father been at home. He had precise ideas about where a woman should be seen smoking: not in the stree...
Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy.
On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she wa...
Nothing as singular or as important had happened since the day of his birth. She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty in a face which a lifet...
It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid—and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every erro...
In science too, one dedicates his life to an Albanian snail, another to a virus. Darwin gave eight years to barnacles. And in wise later life, to earthworms. The Higgs boson, a tiny thing, perhaps not...
I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.
Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people...
Everyone knew the urge to run from the world; few dared do it.
Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.
Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
By degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives.
And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not r...
Beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.
I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.