Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Ind...
Once a killer, always a killer.
Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shiverin...
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...
Joey aveva sorriso con furia per impedirsi di piangere. La sua ferita gli sembrava strutturale, come se lui e suo padre avessero scelto le proprie idee politiche al solo scopo di odiarsi, e l'unico mo...
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 had to be possible to do better than her parents, but she wasn’t sure she would.
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.
Impossibility is attractive.
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 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 may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but I’m alive now. And I can live deliberately. I’ve paid the price, I’ve done the work, and I have nothing to be ashamed of. And when the event, the big chan...
I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them.
How the hours can pass with mere kissing is lost to me now, along with the rest of my youth.
His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike...
He’d realized only recently that at the center of the act of sitting down was a loss of control, a blind backwards free fall.