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 the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.
It's a country of big children, people being naughty behind the teacher's back, people tattling on each other, people getting their dumb certificates for being good socialists. People submitting to th...
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 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...
In the elevator it seemed to Enid that the ship was suffering not only from a seesaw motion but also from a yaw, as if its bow were the face of someone experiencing repugnance.
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.
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...
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 suspect that art has always had a particularly tenuous purchase on the American imagination because ours is a country to which so few terrible things have ever happened.
I segreti erano potere. I soldi erano potere. Essere necessari a qualcuno era potere. Potere, potere, potere: com'era possibile che il mondo girasse intorno alla lotta per una cosa che creava solitudi...
I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.
I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.
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 resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained.
His inner life now consisted of little but obsessing about his image on an Internet that felt like death to him; of
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.
Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.