The deader the ball, the better it suited her purpose, which was to whack the shit out of it until she was physically exhausted. She thought this was quite possibly the most satisfying thing she’d eve...
Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head.
Only I still had a problem. The problem was my parents. Of the many things I was afraid of in those days - spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, musi...
It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
In a decadent society people can slowly drift or slowly be drawn by the culture of commerce into yearning for violence. Maybe people have a deep congenital awareness that no civilization lasts forever...
I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun...
I know Martin sometimes watches pornography, we don’t have secrets from each other, and if he didn’t watch it he probably would be the only man in Germany who didn’t—I think Internet pornography was d...
He suspected that somewhere, somehow, this new technology was stupid or lazy. Some young engineer had taken a shortcut and failed to anticipate the consequences that he was suffering now. But because...
ليس من الممكن في ظروف مالية منتعشة كهذه أن يفشل إلا أحمق أو نصاب.
The main form of family interaction was playing cards and board games, at which it was assumed that everyone was trying to cheat.
How terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for power. Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle f...
The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.
The father was dry-eyed but the mother kept erupting, like loudly, unprovoked, in a keening foreign wail that was almost like song; it sounded strangely ceremonial and impersonal, like a lament for an...
The cold breeze and the cold of Richard's Camel were mixing like joy and remorse.
Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?
Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of wor...
Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.
I had started keeping a journal, and I was discovering that I didn't need school in order to experience the misery of appearances. I could manufacture excruciating embarrassment in the privacy of my b...
He may not have been exactly what she wanted in a man, but he was unsurpassable in providing the rabid fandom which, at the time, she needed even more than romance.
And yet the feeling of injustice itself turned out to be strangely physical. Even realer, in a way, than a her hurting, smelling, sweating body. Injustice had a shape, an a weight, and a temperature,...