I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction.
I thought, I fanced, that in a moment, I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has.
I liked the way the Jewish religion seemed, on the whole, to have devoted so much energy and art to finding loopholes in its crazy laws; I like what this seemed to me to imply about its attitude towar...
I do my writing in the morning, now, if the boy will let me, and in the afternoon when I’m not teaching, and sometimes in the evening when I get home from the Alibi Tavern.
He looked like a man dangerously addicted to the correction of mistaken people.
For true contentment, one must carry a book at all times.
For as long as I could remember, I'd been making vague and confident assurances that any day I would finish the thing [my book]. If and when I ever did, they would probably feel an almost physical sen...
Crabtree's father was a Pentecostalist preacher somewhere out in Hogscrotum County, MO, and his mother was the editor-in-chief of a magazine for knitting-machine enthusiasts. 'She can make you anythin...
Bird of Wide Experience I
As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like How sane are we? and Do our lives have meaning?
Archy was tired of Nat, and he was tired of Gwen and of her pregnancy with all the unsuspected depths of his insufficiency that it threatened to reveal. He was tired of Brokeland, and of black people,...
Anyway, it's a pretty good story, I said. You have to admit.Yeah? He crumpled up the Kleenex, having dispatched the solitary tear. You can have it. I'm giving it to you. After I'm gone, write it down....
And policemen. They were obliged to sneak past two en route to Kampa. Thomas was a contentedly law-abiding child, with fond feelings toward policemen. He was also afraid of them. His notion of prisons...
All he would have needed to do, to find comfort in the Christian's words, was to believe.
But he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.
The baby, not too young to start knowing the ledge, the cold truth, the life-and-death facts of it all. 'What kind of heaven is that, you can't have your records?' The baby, understanding perhaps it w...
Те, кто зарабатывает себе на жизнь, играя с катастрофой, развивают в себе способность пессимистического воображения, что зачастую почти неотличимо от проницательности.
Writers—like insomniacs—are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when...
The Mandrill with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle opponents.
Just because you have stopped believing in something you once were promised does not mean that the promise itself was a lie.