Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands.
He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.
He had not spoken to a desirable woman who was not at some level his enemy or a whore since 1944.
He could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.
Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic...
Fue siendo alumno de este hombre cuando empecé a preguntarme si los literatos no sufren alguna variedad de desequilibrio mental, desequilibrio que, pensando en el trepidante balanceo nocturno de Alber...
Fatherhood impose[s] an obligation that [is] more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitmen...
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...
Do what you gotta do and stay fly
Because you know, truth is, I don’t give a shit about some scratched-up vinyl Rahsaan Kirk, Ornette Coleman sound-like-a-goose-trying-to-fuck-a-bicycle bootleg pressing from the rare Paris concert of...
At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.
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,...
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.
Although it wasn't raining anymore, the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze.
Alcohol as helpful to the making of scapegoats as mud to the shaping of golems.
A laboring woman, though, while she endured her labor, lay at the center of something truly radiant in four dimensions; every birth everywhere, all the vectors of human evolution and migration origina...
A great feat of engineering is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction
A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.
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.
But he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.