The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church's religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory.
The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within...
The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings—the disco...
THE STORY GOES THAT I sucked too avidly at my mother’s breast, and caused an abscess to bloom in the tender flesh of her left nipple. My grandmother, less kind in those days than afterward, disapprove...
Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.
My dear son, It is a puzzle worthy of the best psychiatrist that a human life can be so utterly void and at the same time filled to bursting with
In order to destroy the world, it becomes necessary to save it.
His mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch.
His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.
Here its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect.
He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like How sane are we? and Do our lives have meaning? The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.
He had yet to fall in love to the degree that he felt he was capable of falling, had never written villanelles or declaration veiled in careful metaphor, nor sold his blood plasma to buy champagne or...
For true contentment, one must carry a book at all times.
Bird of Wide Experience I
Although it was only nine o’clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he’d strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his comp...
— Люди, — сказал он, — замечают, только когда им специально об этом скажешь. И снова замечают, только когда им особо напомнишь.
Но Джо казалось, что среди всего вышеперечисленного — и фаустовского гордого высокомерия в том числе — не содержалось настоящих причин того, что время от времени толкало людей все же отваживаться созд...
Series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead or a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, s...
Adventures befall the unadventuresome as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold.
We can’t take pleasure in a work of art, not in good conscience, without accepting the implicit intention of the artist to please us.
