Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.
Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
Du skal bare huske at det ikke er en perfekt krig i en perfekt verden.
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.
The problem is we trust technology. We put our trust in the safing of the warheads, and we neglect the human side, because tech problems are easy and human problems are hard.
Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.
Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance
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.
Worse than spanking or even liver was the sound of someone else’s Ping-Pong.
I admire your capacity for admiring.
He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He an...
And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight-- isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and l...