But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.
But in the world of consumer advertising and consumer purchasing, no evil is moral. The evils consist of high prices, inconvenience, lack of choice, lack of privacy, heartburn, hair loss, slippery roa...
Birds were like dinosaurs' better selves. They had short lives and long summers. We all should be so lucky as to leave behind such heirs.
As soon as she hit the Send button, she had a spasm of remorse; her interval between action and remorse was diminishing so rapidly that soon she might be all remorse, unable to act at all; which might...
As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.
Around her ribs and waist were curves of the kind that wind carves in snowdrifts.
And the posture of the older oak trees reaching toward this sky had a jut, a wildness and entitlement, predating permanent settlement; memories of an unfenced world were written in the cursive of thei...
And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?
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.
Zachary's mother, Lucy, waylaid him on the third-floor landing and offered, unsolicited, her opinion that the Traumatics had been the kind of adolescently posturing, angst-mongering boy group that nev...
You can think of me thinking of you, because that’s what I’ll be doing whenever you think of me.
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.
The truth is that nothing between Patty and Richard was ever going to last, because they couldn't help being disappointments to each other, because neither was as lovable to the other as Walter was to...
The soul,' he said to Pip, 'is a chemical sensation. What you see lying on this sofa is a glorified . Every enzyme has its special job to do. It spends its life looking for the specific molecule it's...
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.
So I envy animals. Dogs especially, because nothing smells bad to them.
She quickly discovered that the world is divided into people who know how to be comfortable by themselves on a bar chair and people who do not.