He told himself he would move faster and smarter alone, but the truth was that he was grieving for Aughenbaugh, and like a lot of grieving people who keep a habitual distance from their emotions, he t...
He felt the shock of contact. The weight of her against his chest felt like something she had decided to entrust to him. He
Fuck what is written, Landsman says. You know what? All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the prom...
Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.
Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.
Days go by, and I don't remember not to forget..
But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.
But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared co...
But the boy had a gift. And it was in the nature of a gift that it be endlessly given.
Bina and Landsman were twisted together, a braided pair of chromosomes with a mystery flaw. And now? Now each of them pretends not to see the other and looks away.Landsman looks away.
Approaching the Williamsburg Bridge - not really certain of how he had managed to find himself there - he experienced an extraordinary moment of buoyancy, of grace. There was a lot more traffic now, b...
And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn't have to understand what you feel, and I don't expect it. It's enough if he understands what you just said.
An excess of the desire to appear grown up is one of the defining characteristics of adolescence.
Always true to the code, she said.
A patchwork of expedients, conflicting principles, innovations nobody understood, holdovers that ought to have been taken off the books years ago. Yet in the midst of modern confusion, fundamental
A model of probity, a steady hand to reassure the grieving, a sober man—a grave man—solid as the pillar of a tomb. A good dose of gangster to the hat to let you know the councilman played his politics...
It had bred false camaraderies and drawn my attention to deep flaws and fault lines when what mattered--what matters so often in the course of everyday human life--were the surfaces and the joins.
And like a lot of grieving people who keep a habitual distance from their emotions, he thought that being alone was what he needed.
There was a general impression of imminent catastrophe and red lipstick.
The kind of person who in one moment could guess, with breathtaking coldness, at the innermost sorrow in your heart, and in the next moment turn and, with a cheery wave of farewell, march blithely thr...