When we held Owen Meany above our heads, when we passed him back and forth - so effortlessly - we believed that Owen weighed nothing at all. We did not realize that there were forces beyond our play....
When they weren’t praying, they did what schoolgirls everywhere do. They laughed, they shrieked, they burst into hysterical sobs – all for no apparent reason… The schoolgirls also played the worst Wes...
When I first came to Canada, I thought it was going to be easy to be a Canadian; like so many stupid Americans, I pictured Canada as simply some northern, colder, possibly more provincial region of th...
What I saw in Washington that October were a lot of Americans who were genuinely dismayed by what their country was doing in Vietnam; I also saw a lot of other Americans who were self-righteously attr...
We can afford the workers’ compensation, Harry—he’ll watch what he says the time next, won’t he? Nils would say. The ‘next time,’ Nils, Grandpa Harry would gently correct his old friend.
Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean––make sure know what they mean!
Wasn’t this the point Juan Diego had made repeatedly? Women readers kept fiction alive—here was another one. When Juan Diego had used Spanish in crying out the scholastic’s name, the Chinese girl knew...
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
Those who plead for the lives of the unborn should consider the lives of the living. ...the unborn are not as wretched or as in need of our assistance as the born! Please take pity on the born!
These same people who tell us we must defend the lives of the unborn-they are the same people who seem not so interested in defending anyone but themselves after the accident of birth is complete! The...
There was a twofold awkwardness attached to Juan Diego’s attempts to have sex with the life-size Guadalupe doll—better said, the awkwardness of Juan Diego’s imagining he was having sex with the plasti...
There is at least one terrible thing about lovers – real lovers, I mean: people who are in love with each other, even then they will relish their every physical contact in a sexual way; even when they...
There are always suicides, Garp wrote, among people who are unable to say what they mean.
The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not designed for people who walk on their hands.
The situation Larch was thinking of was war, the so-called war in Europe; Larch, and many others, feared that the war wouldn’t stay there. (‘I’m sorry, Homer,’ Larch imagined having to tell the boy. ‘...
The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet s...
The one critisism the author of Slaugherhouse-Five would make of the young writer was what he called a punctuation problem. Mr. Vonnegut didn't like all the semicolons. 'People will probably figure ou...
The good gringo asked Lupe if she forgave him for sleeping with her mother. Yes, Lupe said, but we can’t ever get married.
The Winkles were in the business of manufacturing sensations for people who were so removed from any sensations of their own making or circumstances that only high (but simulated) adventure could prov...
The Winkles appeared to greet the morning vigorously. Although Homer had never heard human beings make love, or moose mate, he knew perfectly well that the Winkles were mating. If Dr. Larch had been p...