Yet entertainment--as I define it, pleasure and all--remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us...
Wow,’ said Eddie. Oriole had revealed the secret of her necklace to him many times in the past, in exactly these terms, following the script of the tour she conducted for visitors through a fragmentar...
When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, 'In everything but sexual preference.
When at last his moment came, he rose and stood, the only mourner at his end of the room, a solitary tower imprisoning an anonymous sorrow. First he wished for a Redeemer whose arrival he did not expe...
What I came to dislike about Little League that spring was not the regulation per se, or the fathers--whose consciousness had generally been raised at least a little bit--or the tedium, or the low qua...
Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed...
Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance.
There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innoc...
The shaping of a golem, to [Joe] was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce some...
The girl was a labyrinth to him; only by chance and error did he ever stumble blindly into her heart.
The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball, Peavine's book began, whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When...
The April night on which Sammy felt most aware of the luster of his existence - the moment when, for the first time in his life, he was fully conscious of his own happiness - was a night that he would...
Smoke had left the eye sockets of houses with black eyebrows of astonishment. Cats
Shprintzl Rudashevsky’s wide face takes on a philosophical, even mystic, blankness. She looks like she’s wetting her pants and enjoying the warmth.
Sara hadn’t the faintest idea of how she looked, or of what effect her deinotherian body might have on a man.
Over the years I’d surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions.
One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing.
Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.
It was the kind of dress you tend to see hanging in the closet of a woman who owns only one dress.
It was not an inordinately large ass, yet the heft of it seemed to connect him to an immense source of gravitation, one for which he was belatedly grateful, as though for a long time he had been weigh...