They had started one of those wish-fulfillment kids’ adventure books, where the boy hero has exactly the qualities he needs to triumph, at every moment… She’d been bored and annoyed, and at one point...
Diabetes is passed that way -- over and down, like a knight in chess.
She craved a family, not having had enough of one to understand what a pain in the ass it was.
The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way?
But how could you measure your own pain against the pain of the world?
At the simplicity of the gesture, he felt a pang: the raw nerve of his loneliness exposed.
We have to think of a question that we wouldn't otherwise want to answer.'He stood over the pot, looking down at the leaves. 'Something like, Who do you fancy?''That might work,' I said, even though i...
People regressed, around their families, to the age at which they had been angriest.
I guess if everyone was blind, and you tried to describe vision to them, it would sound crazy and made up.
Whenever we tamper with natural laws, there are consequences, the count said. The larger the disruption, the larger the consequence.
His heart felt dangerously full, for the first time in years. That dried-up battered organ, suddenly flush with love. It could kill him.
Children were experiments, and his had failed.
He who delays the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out.
You—die?
One aspect of human resilience, in all its marvelousness, was the ability to recalibrate, to adjust to new circumstances with astonishing speed.
But the commandments were absolute. The stone tablets Moses brought down from the mountain had not said Thou shalt not kill except when fighting Nazis, or in self-defense, or in some other situations,...
And braking,
They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness.
Maybe the Fates snipped with their scissors when they wanted to snip.
It takes experience to know what is a catastrophe (Richard Hughes, 'A High Wind in Jamaica'),