Let us not mock God with metaphor,Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
It’s the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time.
In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to...
I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.
I felt the superb iron of Barth’s paragraphs, his magnificent seamless integrity and energy in this realm of prose—the specifically Christian—usually conspicuous for intellectual limpness and dishones...
How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.
He doesn't know, what to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn't know seems to make him infinitely small and impossible to capture. Its smallness fills him like a vastness.
As they deepen together he feels impatience that through all their twists they remain separate flesh; he cannot dare enough, now that she is so much his friend in this search; everywhere they meet a w...
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
Truth should not be forced it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
Write him down, if he must write him down as something, as a disbeliever; he disbelieved in the Pope, in the Kremlin, in the Vietcong, in the American eagle, in astrology, Arthur Schlesinger, Eldridge...
The universe is a pointless, self running machine, and we are insignificant by-products, whom death will tuck back into oblivion, with or without holy fanfare.
She went through some motions of housekeeping. Why was there nothing to sleep in but beds that had to be remade, nothing to eat from but dishes that had to be washed?
Martyrs of a sort they were, these children, along with the town drunk, in his basketball sneakers and buttonless overcoat, draining blackberry brandy from a paper bag as he sat on his bench in Kazmie...
If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.
He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids.
Hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.