Curiously, the darkness seemed to have something to do with Harriet, Ron's intended, and I thought for a time that it was simply the reality of Harriet's arrival that had dramatized the passing of tim...
But they don't deserve to be winning!And who does in this world, Roland? Only the gifted and the beautiful and the brave? What about the rest of us, Champ? What about the wretched, for example? What a...
But in Old Rimrock, NJ, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and started to crow, It doesn't get any better than this, they may...
As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who...
Among the writers he was reading when he wrote these stories in the 1950s—and he was reading all the time, all kinds of books, dozens and dozens of them—were David Riesman, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamu...
A nervous, undernourished girl who continually looked down the front of her gown as though there was some sort of construction project going on under her clothes.
A Jewish man with parents alive is a 15-year-old boy and will remain a 15-year-old boy until they die.
Hoe weemoedig hij soms ook mocht kijken naar zulke echtparen in de vallende schemering of op zondagmiddagen, de week had nog meer uren en hun leven was niets voor hem, als hij zijn melancholie weer de...
Everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to do.
You are America. Yes, you are, my wicked boy. When we flew to New York and drove in on the highway, whatever the highway is, and those graveyards that are surrounded by cars and the traffic, and that...
Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn’t surprise us, as astonishing to...
There it was: the tactless severity of vital male youth, not a single doubt about his coherence, blind with self-confidence and the virtue of knowing what matters most. The ruthless sense of necessity...
That’s what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.
She might have wallowed a long while in the pleasures of resistance and the challenge of discovering how unrestrained she could be. But she would have been at home. At home you flip out a little and t...
She had been stopped when Morty was killed, stopped from going forward, and all the logic went out of her life. She wanted life, as all people do, to be logical and linear, as orderly as she made the...
Nathan called all shiksas Maria--the explanation seemed as ludicrously simple as that.
Many farcical, illogical, incomprehensible transactions are subsumed by the mania of lust.
Madeline displayed the bright sadder-but-wiser outlook of an alert first grader who’d discovered the alphabet in a school where Ecclesiastes is the primer—life is futility, a deeply terrible experienc...
I am not impressed by the White House! my father cried, hammering on the table to shut her up after she’d said the White House for the fifteenth time. I am only impressed by who lives there. And the p...
Doctor, I had never had anybody like her in my life, she was the fulfillment of my most lascivious adolescent dreams– but marry her, can she be serious? You see, for all her preening andperfumes, she...