Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
Her life would have been easier if she hadn't loved him so much, but she couldn't help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him.
The weekly thirty minutes of sexual stress was a chronic but low-grade discomfort, like the humidity in Florida
In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no pri...
Du skal bare huske at det ikke er en perfekt krig i en perfekt verden.
Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.
You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles a...
Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.
Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able t...
Det var det der holdt mig vågen om natten, sagde Walter. Den her opsplitning af landet. For det er det samme problem overalt. Det er ligesådan med internettet eller kabel-tv - der er aldrig noget cent...
Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric...
How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and out...
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.
La gente è venuta in questo paese per cercare soldi o libertà. Se non hai i soldi, ti aggrappi ancora più rabbiosamente alle tue libertà.
Even then, when the hike was perfect, I would wonder, 'Now what?' And take a picture. Take another picture. Like a man with a photogenic girlfriend he didn't love.
And Pip wanted to do good, if only for lack of better ambitions.
You see a person with kids, she said, and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you’re attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.
What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.