While in a vintage restaurant...the past isn't quaint while you're in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you see it as decor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.
Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is.
When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.
When I get out of here, if I'm ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, yet another remove. It's impossible to say a thi...
What's dangerous in the hands of the multitudes, he said, with what may or may not have been irony, is safe enough for those whose motives are...Beyond reproach, I said.He nodded gravely. Impossible t...
What possesses them, these young girls with a talent for self-immolation?
What pays for all this?Grief in the face of inevitable death. The wish to stop time. The human condition.
What fiendishness went on in kitchens across the country, in the name of providing food!
We wait, the clock in the hall ticks, Serena lights another cigarette, I get into the car. It’s a Saturday morning, it’s a September, we still have a car. Other people have had to sell theirs. My name...
We should think only beautiful things, as much as we can. There is so much beautiful in the world if you look around. You are only looking at the dirt under your feet, Jimmy. It's not good for you.
We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women.
We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.
We are containers, it's only the insides of our bodies that are important.
Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.
Vancouver is the suicide capital of the country. You keep going west until you run out. You come to the edge. Then you fall off.
Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast...
Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.
Those in pain have no time for the pain they cause.
This is what I miss… not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen.
This is how it starts, among the closed circles of the marooned, the shipwrecked, the besieged: jealousy, dissention, a breach in the groupthink walls. Then the entry of the foe, the murderer, the sha...