Can it be that what provides for us is the very thing that poisons us? Who hasn't considered this terrible possibility?
But eating with genuine good appetite is no easy thing when you are seated at the opposite end of a long table from a man who makes it a point of moral significance to subsist on half a grapefruit, ea...
At the center of the bouquet is a monstrous peony, probably purchased on sale at the supermarket. By Tuesday its curling petals had begun to collect at the bottom of the vase, infusing the room with t...
Also her perfume, which mingled with the crisp air off the lake below, creating an intoxicating mixture of damp earth and leaves and water and girl. Not woman, in Sully’s opinion. Girl.
His conviction that he was not put here in this world to learn other people's lessons. He'll accept his punishment because he has no choice, but he'll pass when it comes to the education...If we were...
He was pouring vinegar onto the hot grill, where it sputtered and foamed and hissed. The air was full of it for a few seconds, enough to get everyone at the counter teared up, but just as quickly it w...
He had to comfort himself with the firm conviction that most of what he objected to in Mohawk and the world at large was not the result of people reading the wrong books, but rather of not reading any...
There have been times, Father Mark admitted, when I feared that God would turn out to be like my maternal grandmother [...] Ours was a large family, and every Christmas my grandmother gave gifts of ca...
The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they...
Miles couldn't help admiring women for their ability to dismiss the evidence of their senses. If that's what explained it. If it wasn't simply that from time to time they were unaccountably drawn to t...
For Miles, one of the great mysteries of marriage was that you had to actually say things before you realized they were wrong. Because he'd been saying the wrong thing to Janine for so many years, he'...
As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in...
Diverting one's attention from the past was not the same as envisioning and embarking upon a future. On the other hand, if the past were razed, the slate wiped clean, maybe fewer people would confuse...