You cook the native foods to perfection, Robert Childan thought. What they say is true: your powers of imitation are immense. Apple pie, Coca-Cola, stroll after the movie, Glenn Miller...you could pas...
Most horrid sound in the world, that of the once-was: alive in the past, perishing in the present, a corpse made of dust in the future.
He still never saw her as anything but a direct, literal invitation of God's, dropped into his life for reasons he would never know.
A person’s authentic nature is a series of shifting, variegated planes that establish themselves as he relates to different people; it is created by and appears within the framework of his interperson...
After he saw God [Tony Amsterdam] felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, th...
Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well. A portion of him tu...
Back to Germany, one of the cops said, surveying him. I’m an American, Frank Frink said. You’re a Jew, the cop said.
Because of an imaginary voice, Nicholas had become a whole person; rather than the partial person he had been in Berkeley. If he had remained in Berkeley he would have lived and died a partial person,...
Because when the death-dealing powers of ice and cold reach your loins, your breasts and hips and buttocks as well as your heart—it was already deep in her heart, surely—then there will be no more wom...
Blood, Herr Reiss, can never be eradicated like ink.
But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn't matter.
But in the end I decided against it. The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except more nuts. The whole world is full of nuts. It's enough to get you down.
But she looked—smaller. As if something in her had dwindled away, as if she had dried up. It was almost—age. Yet not quite. Could their separation have done this much damage? He doubted it. His wife,...
Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined... or one great figure... or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.
Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life.
Don’t you feel it? he kidded her. The historicity?
Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida.
Everything in life is just for a while.
FRECK: (Casually) I bought a methedrine plant today. BARRIS: (With a snotty expression on his face) Methedrine is a benny, like speed; it’s crank, it’s crystal, it’s amphetamine, it’s made synthetical...
Fat heard in her rational tone the harp of nihilism, the twang of the void.
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