If you lived in the same place long enough, everything reminded you of everything else.
However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks.
How could she pursue the transcendence and virtue of the intellectual life when her mind had disappeared into her body like a sponge into a basin of ink? Which did not mean,
Do you think I would want to live under a government that you ran or set up? It’s all very nice to say you’re an anarchist, but you only want anarchy for yourself. For the rest of us, you want to make...
At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road.
After he got back to his apartment that evening, Arthur remembered how completely he'd thought he'd solved the problem of his own childhood once he'd claimed Lillian and enveloped her in his dream--no...
But from this distance, the velvety reds, flashing yellows and glassy whites [of the roses] seemed to break up the light of the summer sun into its various elements and cast it back far more brilliant...
In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to...
What it feels like to resist without seeming to resist, to absent yourself while seeming respectful and attentive.
Two, she thought, was the most ephemeral age, the age of incipient consciousness, when personality was first chinking into place. Felicity was her last chance to enjoy this, and so she did, day after...
If you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can’t get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the sense...
I had a burden lift off me that I hadn't even felt the heaviness of until then, and it was the burden of having to wait and see what was going to happen.
He’d said, Remember that Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’? The dairy farmer’s curse is, may you have an interesting herd of cows.
He was turning out to be one of those men whose interest diminished as they got to know you. You got into this pattern of trying to be interesting by revealing more and more of yourself, like a salesm...
Don’t you want to know what happened? Carol turned to look at her and put her hands on her hips. She said, No, I don’t, because I don’t want you making a story out of it, because as soon as you make a...
After him came a cast of characters out of her worst nightmares—Linda Chavez, Arch Puddington, twenty others as bad, all of whom, she could imagine, had a secret password such as a derogatory remark a...
And that's how the tournament started, the Million Dollar World Series of Monopoly......Jess and Pete thought alike -- like city boys, my father would have said, looking for the payoff in a situation...
What Is Really Going On in Spain? was another. Who’s the Boss? was about whether members of the
There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.
She was almost sixty and she had not been to London, or Paris, or Rome, and there was no going there now. Yes, she was balanced, as she had gotten into the habit of congratulating herself for being. B...