Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it n...
Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one alternative sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional exp...
For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval...
For David Shenk, the most important of the windows onto meaning afforded by Alzheimer’s is its slowing down of death. Shenk likens the disease to a prism that refracts death into a spectrum of its oth...
Finally there came a crisp blue afternoon, a Sunday, the day after Daylight Saving ended, when they met at the park at three o’clock and hit for so long that the light began to fail. Pip was in an abs...
Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train he...
Everyone thinks they have strict limits, she said, until they cross them.
Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married.
Dad, Dad, Dad. What’s wrong? Alfred looked up at his son and into his eyes. He opened his mouth, but the only word he could produce was I— I— I have made mistakes— I am alone— I am wet— I want to die—...
Could a more perfect manufactured object than a tennis ball be imagined? Fuzzy and spherical, squeezable and bouncy, its stitching a pair of matching tongues, its voice on impact a pock in the most pl...
Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture in his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was.This futility had let's call it a fla...
Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!
Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart's getting crus...
AT LEAST THE WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT IS GOING WELL.
A source of continual embarrassment along the American frontier—from the late 1600s until the end of the Indian Wars, in the 1890s—was a phenomenon known as the White Indians. The term referred to whi...
A contact low.
A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus: a sense that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths t...
He could feel the outside world closing in on him, demanding his consideration, but as long as he stayed by himself in the woods he was able to remain true to his refusal. He came from a long line of...
Per me, - disse Walter, - la differenza è che gli uccelli uccidono perché devono mangiare. Non lo fanno con rabbia, non lo fanno senza motivo. Non è una cosa nevrotica. Per me è questo che rende la na...
Wow, thank you so much for the compliment! Patty answered brightly, to end things. At the time, she believed that it was because she was so selflessly team-spirited that direct personal compliments ma...