Luck was really stubbornness married to a knack for observation, a fluid sense of the truth, a sharp ear for lies, and a deeply suspicious nature. They’d
Bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to b...
An ancient woman, swarthy and whiskered and crooked like a finger.
[A]dventures befall the unadventuresome as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result -- and have been since at least the time of Odysseus -- of the fatal...
You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the
You could almost see the idea elbowing its way around the inside of his mind, like Athena in the cranium of Zeus.
What would she be saying if she did? That she did want to marry him? For ten years, at least, since she was twelve or thirteen, Rosa had been declaring roundly to anyone who asked that she had no inte...
Valetta, he said, thinking she still looked good, then abandoning his Spidey sense long enough to let her take him in her arms, the skin of her bare shoulder in a halter top cool against his shoulder,...
Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving—amateurs—we proceed, seeking out the blank places i...
They're all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.
They weren't my family and it wasn't my holiday, but I was orphaned and an atheist and I would take what I could get.
The smell by now was indescribable, a compound of burnt aging automobile stinks and the natural odors of death and blood—sweet as garbage, acrid as gasoline, the smell of a thousand rubber tires rolle...
The shock and fragrance of life, steaming red life, given off by the trail of the German's blood in the snow was a reproach to Joe, the reproach of something beautiful and inestimable, like innocence,...
The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and l...
Taking pains, working hard, not flaunting his or her chops so much as relying on them, the pop artisan teeters on a fine fulcrum between the stern, sell-the-product morality of the workhorse and the a...
Such regrets would come only belatedly, a few days after, when he made the realization that death really did mean that you were never going to see the dead person ever again. What he regretted most of...
See you in the funny papers, he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty. In my panache is their hope for salvation.
One of the fundamental axioms of masculine self-regard is that the tools and appurtenances of a man's life must be containable within the pockets of his jacket and pants. Wallet, keys, gum, show or ba...
On a clear night in blacked-out countryside, in between bomber runs, when the tracer fire ceased and the searchlights went dark, the stars did not fill the sky so much as coat it like hoarfrost on a w...
ONE OF THE STURDIEST PRECEPTS of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing. The months preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor offer a rare exception t...