She felt as if, while working and sleeping and working and sleeping, she’d aged so rapidly that she’d passed Emile and caught up with her parents.
She didn’t need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thu...
Robin’s voice on the executive chef’s line came to signify tongue. She didn’t say more than a word or two before Denise tuned out. Robin’s tongue and lips continued to form the instructions demanded b...
Robin turned and looked straight into her. What’s life for? I don’t know. I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.
Most of the lights were burning brightly, but near the center of the spool was a patch of unlit bulbs—a substantia nigra deep inside the tangle.
Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary.
Kluger notes that these cases arguably amount to personal injury claims in disguise, and that the Supreme Court has ruled that federal cigarette-labeling laws are an effective shield against such clai...
It’s like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.
It's something to be anxious about, Manley said, if you want to be anxious about something.
It was exceedingly improbable that he would ever see the men again, but, as my father said, you never knew. Always worth approaching every man you met as if he might become your best friend in the wor...
It had to be possible to do better than her parents, but she wasn’t sure she would.
In the kitchen Enid dredged the Promethean meat in flour and laid it in a Westinghouse electric pan large enough to fry nine eggs in ticktacktoe formation.
If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence.
I was very young, and so I know, my mother said. I know what can happen. We’re not you, Anabel said. That’s what everyone thinks, my mother said. They think they’re not like other people. But then lif...
I think there's a real hunger for people speaking truth to power. Like, there's a little minority now that's saying you sounded like an asshole and a whiner. But that's just the player-hating fringe....
I saw it all of a sudden. That whether I liked it or not, the survivor and the artist was me, not her. We're all conditioned to think of our children as more important than us, you know, and to live v...
I have often wondered what the prey is feeling when it is captured. Often it seems to become completely still in the predator’s jaws, as if it feels no pain. As if nature, at the very end, shows mercy...
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.
Her house was the heavy (but not indefinitely heavy) and sturdy (but not everlasting) God that she'd loved and served and been sustained by.