Billy's one and only moment of candor was when I parked him in front of my computer to play a game. He took one look at the Noah's Ark display and his whole face flinched like someone had hit him. He...
Amy, his mother, is not the mending type. Her speciality is thrashing grown-up men until they whimper for mercy.
To her, all familiar responses smell of entrapment. Sharing an old joke, singing an old song - these are admissions of defeat, of being satisfied with one's lot. In the sky, the Fates are watching, an...
Façades of the unknown city loomed up before him, harboring unimaginable wonders—his whole life had been leading up to this.
We are all specialised forms of survivor. We lack what we fundamentally need and forge ahead regardless, hurriedly hiding our wounds, disguising our ineptitude, bluffing our way through our weaknesses...
Todos nosotros somos a la vez objeto de repugnancia y de envidia. Todos nosotros menos los muy pobres, los que sólo tienen por debajo de ellos el pozo séptico del infierno.
Reading, by its very nature, is an admission of defeat, a ritual of self-humiliation: it shows that you believe other lives are more interesting than yours
ISSERLEY ALWAYS DROVE straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to h...
He thought about history, the hidden human anxieties behind momentous events. The tiny trivial things that were probably bothering Einstein or Darwin or Newton as they formulated their theories: argum...
Caroline stands at the window, watching Nellie Griffiths and old Mrs Mulvaney trot down the street on their way to the jam factory. Poor ugly biddies: they spend their daylight hours drudging in the s...
A truly modern man, William Rackham is what might be called a superstitious atheist Christian; that is, he believes in a God who, while He may no longer be responsible for the sun rising, the saving o...
Was a female. Isserley wasn’t interested in females, at least not in that way. Let them get picked up by someone else. If the hitcher was male, she usually went back for another look, unless he was an...
It was already tomorrow. She should have known from the beginning that it would end like this.
Why are there such long words in the world, Miss?’ enquires Sophie, when the mineralogy lesson is over.‘One long difficult word is the same as a whole sentence full of short easy ones, Sophie,’ says S...
There was only so much calamitous change you could hear about, events that rewrote what you thought was general knowledge, before your brain stopped digesting and you clung on to older realities.
She couldn’t quite believe it, even after all these years. It was a phenomenon of stupendous and unjustifiably useless extravagance. Yet here it lay, soft and powdery, edibly pure.
Oasans slept a lot; they got tired easily. They’d work for an hour or two, and then, whether the task had been arduous or not, they would go home and rest in bed for a while. Peter stretched in
Locating a past event in measured time was something they could do with great effort, as a special favor, but Peter could tell they didn’t see the point. Why should it matter exactly how many days, we...
Last week,’ she says, ‘I was in the city, on my way to visit a wretched family I’d visited before, to plead with them once more to listen to the words of their Saviour. I was tired, I felt disinclined...
It burns in her mind, branded there by Mrs Castaway: Wicked is what we can’t help being, little one. The word was invented to describe us. Men love to wallow in sin; we are the sin they wallow in.