Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.
La brezza fredda e il fumo della Camel si mescolavano come gioia e rimorso.
It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals,...
Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.
Impossibility is attractive.
Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.
An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You’d been talki...
Because, no matter how he’d come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize int...
You on the floor in a fugue state, me not knowing what to do. It’s remarkable how high-functioning you are, for an insane person. I’m the only one who gets to see you on the floor.
Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.
Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact.The family was the house's soul.
To her the strangest thought of all was that she might be extraordinarily appealing. It went against everything she believed in, or at least against everything she wanted to believe in; because, deep...
There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She
The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners,
The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was.
The only mainstream American household I know well is the one I grew up in, and I can report that my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheeve...
The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.
The cabin was dark. Inside it was the sound of her childhood, the patter of rain on a roof that consisted only of shingle and bare boards, no insulation or ceiling. She associated the sound with her m...
Thank you, he said. Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It's...