Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.
Birds were what became of dinosaurs. Those mountains of flesh whose petrified bones were on display at the Museum of Natural History had done some brilliant retooling over the ages and could now be fo...
Because after all, Bob said, any wealth gained by a person beyond what he can produce by his own labor must have come at the expense of nature or at the expense of another person. Look around. Look at...
With nothing left to relish or discover, he just might die of boredom.Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.
... It happened very fast. And now that he's dead he can't remember pain. It's as if he'd never existed.'He wanted her to believe this, but he wasn't sure he believed it himself. If time was infinite,...
The chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom.
Although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted to be had, like an animal: in a mute mutual privacy of violence.
There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.
The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.
The note of self-righteousness in his voice set fire to a larger and more diffuse pool of the gas, a combustible political substance that had seeped into her from her mother and then from certain coll...
The mark of a legitimate revolution—the scientific, for example—was that it didn’t brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. Only the weak and fearful, the illegitimate, had to brag.
The man who ‘forgets’ his toothbrush in a woman’s house is a man who wants to come back.
The lump in his throat was evidence of how much, in spite of everything, he still loved her.
The horror of underage smoking veils a horror of teen and preteen sexuality, and one of the biggest pleasant empty dreams being pushed these days by Madison Avenue is that a child is innocent until hi...
That summer when I was feeling very much like Juliet holding the potion, the therapist would tell me, Just know that those thoughts aren’t you. That’s the OCD, it’s not you. It was a kind gesture—she...
So I envy animals. Dogs especially, because nothing smells bad to them.
Sheets of rain were ripping themselves on the apple trees outside the window.
She was like a bank too big in her mother’s economy to fail,
Serious fans always need to feel uniquely connected to the object of their fandom; they jealously guard those points of connection, however tiny or imaginary, that justify the feeling of uniqueness.
Part of why kids like this scared me was that they seemed authentic.