And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
Alfred believed that the real and the true were a minority that the world was bent on exterminating.
Denise left the kitchen and took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward...
It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
The bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as ‘diseased.’ A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medicatio...
To paraphrase Frank Zappa, she’d thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin.
This was what was keeping me awake at night,' Walter said. 'This fragmentation. Because it's the same problem everywhere. It's like the internet, or cable TV- there's never any center, there's no comm...
They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming.
There’s something very wrong when a taste bud is still reporting strangeness five hours after you had a sweetened drink. Do you know that if you smoke crystal meth even once, your entire brain chemist...
The only way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all.
The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.
People nowadays seemed to resent the railroads for abandoning romantic steam power in favor of diesel. People didn't understand the first goddamned thing about running a railroad. A diesel locomotive...
No one stays haunted by a person they’re not still in love with.
Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shiverin...
Leila would have been well advised, before marrying a novelist or imagining herself as one, to wait and sample life in a house where a big book was being contemplated.
Katz could see that Patty, in the seemingly random life-meanderings that Walter had just described to him, had in fact deliberately been trampling symbols in a cornfield, spelling out a message unread...
Joey wished there were some different world he could belong to, some simpler world in which a good life could be had at nobody else’s expense.
Joey aveva sorriso con furia per impedirsi di piangere. La sua ferita gli sembrava strutturale, come se lui e suo padre avessero scelto le proprie idee politiche al solo scopo di odiarsi, e l'unico mo...
It's something to be anxious about, Manley said, if you want to be anxious about something.
Infinitesimally soon, the eternity of his own death would commence and render all of this unreal.