He thought, as the locked truck slid and hit: Too much time staring at the pretty girl, Cherrik. Too much dreaming. Too old, Cherrik. Too damn old.
Gentlemen, a pleasure talking to you. Hope I’ve been of some help. It’s coming upon closing time, and I don’t stay around here one minute more than I need to. We walked to the van. It was no longer in...
Chook’s phone went to nine rings before she answered in the gritty rancor of interrupted sleep. But her voice changed when she recognized mine. Trav! I phoned you last night. Who is that Mrs. Atkinson...
But when they don’t wear helmets, they abuse the taxpayers, taking a couple of weeks to die in intensive care, their primitive brains jellied by hard impact with the concrete highway. Somebody has to...
A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.
The glue that seems to hold mankind in some kind of lasting stasis is everyone’s desire to be useful.
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...
The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity but there is a...
That's the way They do you. That's the way They set you up for it. There ought to be a warning bell on the happy-meter, so that every time it creeps high enough, you get that dang-dang alert. Duck, bo...
She was back in three minutes just to tell me that she couldn’t guarantee she wouldn’t get a little nutty from time to time, but she felt she was past the pill period, and then she headed back toward...
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-...
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.
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 drove out. There were a half-dozen cars there. A house man let me in. Brell came hurrying to me to pump my hand. He was a trim-bodied man in his late forties, dark and handsome in a slightly vulpine...
I could have listed maybe fifty possible reactions without coming close to the one I got. Her eyes dulled and her narrow nostrils flared wide and her mouth fell into sickness. She lost her posture and...
He tottered in. In a few moments he came out, hair piece in place. But the haggardness of his face made it look more spurious than before.
But now Cathy had created the restlessness, the indignation, the beginnings of that shameful need to clamber aboard my spavined white steed, knock the rust off the armor, tilt the crooked old lance an...
All the little gods of irony must whoop and weep and roll on the floors of Olympus when they tune in on the night thoughts of a truly fatuous male.