She wondered: How could people respond to these images if images didn't secretly enjoy the same status as real things? Not that images were so powerful, but that the world was so weak. It could be rea...
She reshelved the sixpack and wrenched herself away to less compelling parts of the store, but it was hard to plan dinner when you felt like throwing up. She returned to the beer shelves like a bird r...
She noted with pleasure that he’d already dispensed with a salutation,
Reporting was imitation life, imitation expertise, imitation worldliness, imitation intimacy; mastering a subject only to forget it, befriending people only to drop them.
Now Connie seemed to be suggesting that what made people complain about stupidity was their own stupidity.
Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love a...
Katz couldn't have said exactly why Walter mattered to him. No doubt part of it was simply an accident of grandfathering: of forming an attachment at an impressionable ago, before the contours of his...
I’m just happy you’re home safely.
It's all circling around the same problem of personal liberties, Walter said. People came to this country for either money or freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can'...
It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals,...
Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.
I considered, quite seriously, strangling her to death while I fucked her and then throwing myself in front of the 8:11 bus. The idea was not without its logic and appeal. But there were the bus drive...
But like so many phenomena that were beautiful at a distance—thunderheads, volcanic eruptions, the stars and planets—this alluring pain proved, at closer range, to be inhuman in its scale.
Believe me,' [...] 'I would know about it. That's the difference between me and your girlfriend. I am the jealous type. I am the Spanish Inquisition when it comes to being fucked around on. No quarter...
Although he, like all people, secretely enjoyed the smell of his own farts, the smell of his shit was somethig else. It was so bad as to seem evil in a moral way.
A candle is like a small sun, but the sun is like a large candle; examined closely, language turns out to operate through the lateral associations of metaphor, rather than through the vertical identif...
The first lesson reading teaches us is how to be alone.
Because, no matter how he’d come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize int...
You on the floor in a fugue state, me not knowing what to do. It’s remarkable how high-functioning you are, for an insane person. I’m the only one who gets to see you on the floor.
Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact.The family was the house's soul.