Regret, hurt, bereavement, loss, to permit the flow of even one tear at the upwelling of such feelings was to imperil ancient root systems and retaining walls. Mudslide and black avalanche would resul...
People notice only what you tell them to notice, he said. And then only if you remind them.
Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.
One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the passing. During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the World’s Fair...
My story and my stories are all, in one or another, the same, tales of solitude and the grand pursuit of connection, of success and the inevitability of defeat.
My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.
Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting...
Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual words; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random hap...
Long life wore away everything that was not essential.
Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that it's a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling moth...
It was the pleasure that a liar takes in his lie as it enters the world wearing the accent and raiment of the truth, sounding so right and plausible that--if he is any kind of liar at all--he begins,...
It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a for...
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 holds my essential stuff, including a book—for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times, and great books so rarely fit, my friends, into one's pocket[…]
In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.
I smiled. I supposed she was exhibiting what people nowadays refer to, with crushing disapproval, as denial. It’s always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be know...
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.
How do I focus it? Joe asked him, lowering the camera. Oh, don’t bother about that. Just look at me and push the little lever. Your mind will do the rest. My mind. Joe snapped a photo of his host, the...
Horror grows impatient, rhetorically, with the Stoic fatalism of Ecclesiastes. That we are all going to die, that death mocks and cancels every one of our acts and attainments and every moment of our...
His illusions about American decency had not survived the reading of American history.