People steal elephants. It happens all the time.
Over the balustrade I could see the dark trees of Webster Groves and the more distant TV-tower lights that marked the boundaries of my childhood. A night wind coming across the football practice field...
Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take he...
Once a killer, always a killer.
My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time.
L'integrità è un valore neutro. Anche le iene hanno una loro integrità. Sono iene allo stato puro.
Kierkegaard, in 'Either/Or,' makes fun of the 'busy man' for whom busyness is a way of avoiding an honest self-reckoning. You might wake up in the middle of the night and realize that you're lonely in...
Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was a succ...
It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.
It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who’d stuck you with a life? O...
It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty’s greatest warming influence was on Walter himself. Now, instead of speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius, he stop...
Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I’m never sure which term is appropriate. Call it all three if you want, Andreas said. Chutzpah. That’s a fourth term.
In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went...
I'm a carnivore, a carnivore, a terrible disgusting carnivore.
I get feminism as an equal-rights issue, he’d said to her once. What I don’t get is the theory. Whether women are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men. And he’d lau...
He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn't the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Ol...
Filtering isn’t phoniness—it’s civilization.
Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there’s no escaping your...
Does the world really need more amateur photographs of giraffes?