I also think it’s possible for us to be better people tomorrow than we are today. He had no idea, of course, whether any of these things were true, in whole or in part. Still, what possible good could...
Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?
Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to g...
Bullshitting god would be Max's plan in a nutshell. Miles could even guess his father's opening gambit. He'd point out to God that if He expected better results, He ought to have given Max better char...
And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.
Aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
Witness the sad demise of fundamental Western values. Pride. Order. Personal responsibility.
She couldn’t quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins Fear no more the heat o’ the Sun, partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the...
We wear the chains we forge in life,
Though here his voice faltered, because he knew as well as she did what came next, what words came next. If he could speak them, he might even convince her they were true, as his father had convinced...
These are not men of great imagination, but one can hardly blame them for not being prepared for this particular contingency, the sight of a tweet-jacketed, tenured, middle-aged, senior professor and...
The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a commi...
The drive back to the Mid-fucking-west was always brutal, his parents barely speaking to each other, as if suddenly recalling last year's infidelities, or maybe contemplating whom they'd settle for th...
The cutthroat savagery of high school romance inspired in nearly all adults a collective amnesia. Having survived it themselves, they locked those memories far away in some dark chamber of their subco...
One of the unfortunate side effects of teaching for forty years was that the task was so monumental, even in recollection, that it sometimes seemed you’d tried to teach everyone on the planet. What Mi...
My God, he couldn't help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over. That, very simply, was what adulthood...
Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you?Sully: Not often. Now and then.
Maybe sheetrocking wasn't one of Sully's favorite jobs, but like most physical labor, there was a rhythm to it that you could find if you cared to look, and once you found this rhythm it'd get you thr...
Lucy, who apparently had no idea his girlfriend's father held him in such low regard, agreed with Noonan that he was pushing the envelope, behaviorwise. Still, he was genuinely fond of the man and did...
I'm about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don't have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of this familiar sequence, which was, but I'm going to a...