Are you a good human being, Gerry? I mean good in the sense that if you put everything in the scales, they’d tip that way? It startled her. I don’t know. I haven’t thought of myself that way. I think...
A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself. But
The glue that seems to hold mankind in some kind of lasting stasis is everyone’s desire to be useful.
When you look at pictures of people you know are dead, there is something different about the eyes. As if they anticipated their particular fate.It is a visceral recognition. I told myself I was getti...
The world is full of damp rocks, with some very strange creatures hiding under them.
The president is selling the country down the river with the help of the Supreme Court. Agree with us or you are a marked traitor. You know the sort of thing, all that tiresome pea-brained nonsense th...
Somebody has to be tireless, or the fast-buck operators would asphalt the entire coast, fill every bay, and slay every living thing incapable of carrying a wallet. These
She was styled for abundant lactation, and her uniform blouse was not.
She was a tall and slender woman, possibly in her early thirties. Her skin had the extraordinary fineness of grain, and the translucence you see in small children and fashion models. In her fine long...
She came back pinked, sun-dazed and slow moving, with spume-salted hair and a sandy butt, displaying upon a narrow palm, with a child’s innocence, a small and perfect white shell, saying in a voice st...
Old friend, there are people—young and old—that I like, and people that I do not like. The former are always in short supply. I am turned off by humorless fanaticism, whether it's revolutionary mumbo-...
Now, of course, having failed in every attempt to subdue the Glades by frontal attack, we are slowly killing it off by tapping the River of Grass. In the questionable name of progress, the state in it...
Nina came out—gloved, pursed, be-hatted, wearing a fall suit a little too tailored for her structure—came out with a frail and indefinite-looking man and paused to argue with him, saying, Freddie, if...
In every contact with every other human in every day of your life, you become what you sense they want of you or, if you are motivated the other way, exactly what they do not want.
If you look over in that direction, like two hundred yards, you will see some birds walking. Never drive the boat toward where the birds are walking. First rule of navigation.
I went back to Lois. She had a glass of bourbon that looked like a glass of iced coffee. Her smile was loose and wet and her eyes didn’t track.
I switched the FM-UHF marine radio to the commercial frequencies and tried to find something that didn't sound like somebody trying to break up a dogfight in a sorority house by banging drums and cymb...
I have no stomach for surprises. I have endured too many of them. They upset me. The elimination of all removable risk is the most plausible way of staying alive.
You feel that a door will open and you will be summoned, and horrid things will happen to you before they let you go. You can not mark these houses with any homely flavor of living. When they are empt...
Who the hell are you? A friend of a friend. Like who? Marianne, works at Charlie Char-Broil. That silly bitch hasn’t got any friends. Had I done any pleading or begging, she would have slammed the doo...