What was education for, if not to acquire contradictions? At least it looked like that to me.
That's not the one you were thinking of? No. There was accusation in her voice. Mine was different,
Sometimes it seemed that she and rudy were two people attempting to tango, sweating and trying, long after the orchestra had grown tired, long after everyone else had gone home.
She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic--drink, don't drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.
I would look out upon the wildflowers, the mulch of swamps and leaves, the spring mosses greening on the rocks, or the boulderous mountains of street-black snow, whatever season it happened to be- my...
He had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good-looking.
Even his I love you's, she said, were like tiny daggers, like little needles or safety pins. Beware of a man who says he loves you but is incapable of a passionate confession; of melting into a sob.
Before he wrote about them, said Quilty, pretending to read the guidebook out loud, Hemingway shot his characters. It was considered an unusual but not unheard-of creative method. Still, even within l...
Why do you haunt me? You, like a tattoo on my tongue, like the bay leaf at the bottom of every pan. You who sprawled out beside me and sang my horoscope to a Schubert symphony, something about travel...
We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps . . . it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.
We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgemental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all.
This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.
The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing Getting to Know You - both verses. At the request of the dean the chai...
Philosophers are good at parties but not for cleaning up after.
No, I'm not Jewish, she said archly, staring him down, to teach him, to teach him this: Are you?Yes, he said. He studied her eyes.Oh, she said.Not many of us in this part of the world, so I thought I'...
No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost sudden...
Her voice was husky, vibrating, slightly flat, coming in just under each note like a saucer under a cup.
Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.
They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
Quilty grimaces. I don’t like what comes after ‘dicker.’ What is that? Quilty sighs. Dickest. I mean, really: it’s not a contest!