Nothing is boring exept to people who aren't really paying attention.
My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There would be ample time for reproach in the event of their survival.
Kohn had played on an intramural team in college. He had been the second-worst player on a team that finished in ninth place out of twelve. Bengt looked a little surprised. What position? Outfield. Ko...
It was awful luck that my pot-hobbled spermatozoa had managed to rally themselves for one last mad fallopian adventure, and that five years’ worth of love, good companionship, and the exhilaration of...
It was at these times that he began to understand, after all these years of study and performance, of feat and wonders and surprises, the nature of magic. The magician seemed to promise that something...
In the end, neither fretting nor bravado could distract him any longer from the thought that he was fatherless. He and his father had in their jocular, gingerly fashion loved each other, but now that...
I understand, he said. Please let me know. He meant it to sound patient and cooperative, but somehow it came out as abject. Rosa started to laugh. She put her arms around him, and he rubbed the smeare...
I DRANK FOR YEARS, and then I stopped drinking and discovered the sad truth about parties. A sober man at a party is lonely as a journalist, implacable as a coroner, bitter as an angel looking down fr...
Her tangle of wild black curls had enacted medusa feats in zero gravity.
Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not decorate it; she infused it.
He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much--indeed to revolve around him--could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all.
He took a step toward her, than another, tentatively, gathering all his strength, as though about to throw a heavy switch that would, if his calculations were correct, bring light to a hundred cities...
He didn’t stop when they got there, though. Just slowed down, in his drag-ass, baby-smelling, style-free Subaru wagon, long enough to check out a banner announcing, in baseball-jersey script, the immi...
He did not fear death exactly, but he had evaded it for so many years that it had come to seem formidable simply by virtue of that long act of evasion. In particular he feared dying in some undignifie...
He addressed the class...in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock.
Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like a dollar coin, of the idea that she was about to bring another abandoned son into the world, the son of an abandoned son. The heir...
For true contentment, one must carry a book at all times.
Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake.
Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.
Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children’s understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make.