The tropics were an olfactory revelation. She realized that, coming from a temperate place like the other Santa Cruz, her own Santa Cruz, she’d been like a person developing her vision in poor light....
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was har...
The dream of radical transformation: of one day waking up and finding himself a wholly different (more confident, more serene) kind of person, of escaping that prison of the given, of feeling divinely...
The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn't understand antiques or architecture, she couldn't draw like Sylvia, she...
Qué hermosa es siempre la cara que no hemos visto.
In the rearview mirror were the evangelical churches, the Tea Party precincts, the Whataburgers. Ahead, the gas and oil wells, the fracking rigs, the overgrazed ranges, the feedlots, the depleted aqui...
Imagine the state of distrust in which I move through the world. Revealing anything shameful to anyone, I run the risk of exposure, censure, mockery. Everyone should be told this about fame before the...
I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her.
For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.
Eager, perhaps, to repay the favor of listening, Sylvia nodded with encouragement. But suddenly she reminded Enid of Katharine Hepburn. In Hepburn's eyes there had been a blank unconsciousness of priv...
By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay it down to sleep. He didn't understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper th...
But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.
A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling.
He was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of...
Weak people hold grudges, Mom. Strong people forgive.
That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men. The men are all looking at pictures of women, and the women are all communicating with other women.
THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to ge...
Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud.
She pondered the arrangements of the paintings on a wall like a writer pondered commas.
Mephistopheles: Over! A stupid word. How so over? Over and pure nothing: completely the same thing! It’s over now! What’s that supposed to mean? It’s as good as if it never was.