In schools—even in good schools, like Exeter—they tend to teach the shorter books by the great authors; at least they begin with those. Thus it was Billy Budd, Sailor that introduced me to Melville, w...
If you want to worry about something, you ought to worry about how Guadalupe was looking at you. Like she’s still making up her mind about you. Guadalupe hasn’t decided about you, the clairvoyant chil...
IF WE CAN DO IT IN UNDER FOUR SECONDS, WE CAN DO IT IN UNDER THREE, he said. IT JUST TAKES A LITTLE MORE FAITH. It takes more practice, I told him irritably. FAITH TAKES PRACTICE, said Owen Meany.
I'm sure I'll have more to say about the penis word.
I will tell you what is my overriding perception of the last twenty years: that we are a civilization careening toward a succession of anticlimaxes – toward an infinity of unsatisfying, and disagreeab...
I try to see the whole woman,' Eddie said to Hannah. 'Of course I recognize that she's old, but there are photographs - or the equivalent of photographs in one's imagination of anyone's life. A whole...
I think that was when the headmaster realized he had lost; he realized then that he was finished. Because, what could he do? Was he going to tell us to stop praying? We kept our heads bowed; and we ke...
I later found a bookstore on the Calle de Gravina—Libros, I believe it was called. (I’m not kidding, a bookstore called Books.)
I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would still be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a...
I didn't try to say the word for Elaine. Cock, I said to her.
For Homer Wells, it was different. He did not imagine leaving St. Cloud's. The Princes of Maine that Homer saw, the Kings of New England that he imagined — they reigned at the court of St. Cloud's, th...
As a police officer, he'd found that uncontained anger was nothing but a menace to him. Whereas contained anger greatly appealed to him, and he believed that people who weren't angry at all were basic...
As Jack would discover, it’s remarkable how you can miss people you barely knew – even those people you never especially liked.
Aren’t eccentricities fairly common among overachievers.
And when Dr. Daruwalla breathed in her dangerous aroma, he thought he'd at last identified the smell of sex, which struck him as an earthy commingling of death and flowers
Again, Homer felt the nudge in his ribs, and Mr. Rose said, mildly, ‘You all so uneducated – Homer’s havin’ a little fun with you.’When the bottle of rum passed from man to man, Mr. Rose just passed i...
Руководящий принцип нашей семьи сводился к тому, что осознание неизбежности печального конца не должно мешать жить полнокровной жизнью. Это базировалось на уверенности в том, что других концов, кроме...
Logic is relative.
In increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us -- not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.
Doris Wales was a woman with straw-blond hair whose body appeared to have been dipped in corn oil; then she must have put her dress on, wet. The dress grabbed at all her parts, and plunged and sagged...