No one stays haunted by a person they’re not still in love with.
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.
La natura, persino su scala ridottissima, si faceva beffe dell’informatica. Anche migliorato dalla tecnologia, il cervello umano era minuscolo, infinitesimo, in confronto all’universo. Eppure avere un...
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...
It’s true I’m male and have some power, but I never asked to be born male. Maybe being male is like being born a predator, and maybe the only right thing for the predator to do, if it sympathizes with...
It's something to be anxious about, Manley said, if you want to be anxious about something.
It seems not to occur to you that I might have had other very smart patients. The difference between them and me is that I’m a psychologist and they are not. I don’t have to be as smart as you to help...
It seems important to cling to the concrete, to remember that illness is not a metaphor or a study but a phenomenon unfolding in (and on) real bodies in real rooms. Its qualia, the crinkly paper hospi...
It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive. More slobbish and louty. Comfort could be found in being poorer than people who were smart and beautiful. But to be...
In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.
In Technology We Trust. Need to put that on the new hundred-dollar bill.
Il primo minuto della giornata lavorativa ci ricorda tutti gli altri minuti di cui è fatto il giorno, e non è mai bene pensare ai minuti come entità singole.
If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, all that registered was something dark flashing by. But if you happened to be gazing directly at the w...
If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agre...
How, by the logic of addiction, could we not have proceeded to the needle and the vein?
Hour after hour, my father lay unmoving and worked his way toward death; but when he yawned, the yawn was his. And his body, wasted though it was, was likewise still radiantly his.
His inner life now consisted of little but obsessing about his image on an Internet that felt like death to him; of
His feeling of having crashed did not consist of envy, exactly, or even entirely of having outlived himself. It was more like despair about the world's splinteredness. The nation was fighting ugly gro...
He was remembering the nights he'd sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with his girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath-smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them fro...
He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. (Sixty’s too bright, he said, and forty is too dim.