The near death of a world-famous painter in a diving accident, in a Greenwich Village drawing room, contributed an unimpeachable Surrealist luster to the party.
The daily sight of her is going to be a torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.
Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect.
She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of imminent doom darkens much of even her sunniest work.
Never worry about what you are escaping from, he said. Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.
My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There
Like the Party he had joined too late, too young, Chan was a lost claim check, a series of time lapse photos of a promise as it broke.
Like most policemen, Landsman sails double-hulled against tragedy, stabilized against heave and storm. It's the shallows he has to worry about, the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque. The...
Life blew in gusts from the hole in the side of the elephant with a rank smell and a comic flatulence.
Landsman recognizes the expression on Dick's face...The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart...
It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that.
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...
It really is a shame that through our sad neglect of wonders, hopefulness, and trust we allowed so much clutter and debris to build up in the space that once connected us to Diamond Green.
It had been quite some time since the duty and pleasure of undressing her son had fallen to Rosa. For several years, she had been wishing him, willing him, into maturity, independence, a general profi...
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 smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife o...
I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated.
I don't want to have 'carnal knowledge' with any old Zuni, asshole. From the way she seemed to relish the word asshole as it unwound from her lips, I guessed that she rarely used it. It sounded like a...
I closed my eyes and I thought of the lash of her skirt snapping around her as she danced one evening in a bar on the South Side to a jukebox that was playing Barefootin’, of the downy slope of her ne...
His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. P...
