The hair compromise he finally agreed to is a white strip on the left side – geriatric punk, he’d whispered to himself – with, recently, the addition of an arresting scarlet patch. The total image is...
The future is in your hands, she resumed. She held her own hands out to us, the ancient gesture that was both an offering and an invitation, to come forward, into an embrace, an acceptance. In your ha...
The cicadas pierce the air with their searing one-note calls; dust eddies across the roads; from the weedy patches at the verges, grasshoppers whir. The leaves of the maples hang from their branches l...
The bell that measures time is ringing
The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there’s a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.
The answer can only be that God has given Adam free will, and therefore Adam may do things that God Himself cannot anticipate in advance.
The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I t...
The Human Words of God speak of the Creation in terms that could be understood by the men of old. There is no talk of galaxies or genes, for such terms would have confused them greatly! But must we th...
The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all kinds. This is why they have bidets.
That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland.
That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled...
That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first in your head, and then you make it real.
Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier.
Staring at the magazine, as he dangled it before me like fish bait, I wanted it. I wanted it with a force that made the ends of my fingers ache. At the same time I saw this longing of mine as trivial...
Sometimes when I am dusting the mirror with the grapes I look at myself in it, although I know it is vanity. In the afternoon light of the parlour my skin is a pale mauve, like a faded bruise, and my...
Sometimes these flashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes. The ordinary, the usual, a reminder, like a kick.
Sometimes I wish she would just shut up and let me walk in peace. But I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something.
Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. They dispense with the calculation of risk and profit, th...
So many crucial events take place behind people’s backs, when they aren’t in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. And the temporary oblivion of sex.
Si sólo es un cuento, parece menos espantoso.