I want to see what can be seen, of him, take him in, memorize him, save him up so I can live on the image, later: the lines of his body, the texture of his flesh, the glisten of sweat on his pelt, his...
I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a...
I sort of like watching them, he said; I watch laundromat washers the way other people watch television, it's soothing because you always know what to expect and you don't have to think about it. Exce...
I sit at the little table, eating creamed corn with a fork. I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife. When there's meat they cut it up for me ahead of time, as if I'm lacking manual skills or teet...
I remember a television program I once saw [...] I must have been seven or eight, too young to understand it. It was the sort of thing my mother liked to watch: historical, educational. She tried to e...
I love you. You're the only one. She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to...
I guess you get all my money, I said. And I'm not even dead. I was trying for a joke, but it came out sounding macabre.Hush, he said. He was still kneeling on the floor. You know I'll always take care...
I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
I am not your justification for existence.
His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile. Thus
He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and freeWhether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a treeOr rolled in the arms of some nymph of the seaWhich is where we would all like to be, man!
Here is a handfulof shadow I have brought back to you:this decay, this hope, this mouth-ful of dirt, this poetry.
Help is what they offer but gratitude is what they want, they roll around in it like cats in the catnip.
He wanted me to play Scrabble with him, and kiss him as if I meant it. This was one of the most bizarre things that's happened to me, ever.
He drowned his sorrows, though like other drowned things they had a habit of floating to the surface when least expected.
Had he been a lunatic or an intellectually honourable man who'd thought things through to their logical conclusion? And was there any difference?
Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.
Florida’s not the hick town you keep saying it is, says Reynolds. Times have changed; they’ve got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it!
Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse.