I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that...
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 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[…]
I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born, Flowers said. They’re like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.
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 can imagine anything except having no imagination.
His illusions about American decency had not survived the reading of American history.
Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands.
Her correspondence had been like the pumping of a heart into a severed artery, wild and incessant at first, then slowing down with a kind of muscular reluctance to a stream that became a trickle and f...
He had not spoken to a desirable woman who was not at some level his enemy or a whore since 1944.
He felt the shock of contact. The weight of her against his chest felt like something she had decided to entrust to him. He
He could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.
Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Ev...
Defiantly serving out the inhumane term of a punishment she had imposed on herself, confusing obedience with rebellion and vindication with endurance. Come, he told her. Put your costume
Combing her thoughts, yanking them into a pigtail.
Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children.
And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.
A great feat of engineering is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction
He lifted his eyes. The eternal kind went out of his shoulder. He opened his mouth and closed it again, speechless with outrage, joy, and wonder. Then he burst into tears.