I put myself up for full professor, an act of such unprecedented and unmitigated arrogance that the committee approved it, thus effectively rooting me to the scene of the crime, too weighed down by te...
His carefully calculated sincerity is almost entirely indistinguishable from the real thing.
He'd discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages - young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talki...
He looks like he sucked the bottle dry about three in the morning and then stayed awake another hour or two to whistle into it.
Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstance, whose faith and love we will reward with our ow...
After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the p...
You get more misanthropic every day.- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.
God) seemed to know everything that was in her heart and to understand that nothing dwelt there that wasn’t absolutely necessary to her survival.
If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always...
Whereas some people’s attitude suggested that perhaps they knew something you didn’t, Mrs. Whiting’s implied that she knew everything you didn’t. She alone had been paying attention, so it was her dut...
To his surprise, she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, a kiss so full of affection that it dispelled the awkwardness, even as it caused Miles' heart to plummet, because all kisses are calibr...
Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully—people still remarked—was nobody’s fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application—that at sixty, he w...
The other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get.
That man truly loathes you, Herbert says when he's sure Rourke isn't coming back. I don't think so, I smile. I just give his life focus, that's all.
So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy.
No. Simplicity and justice require that thought and deed not be carelessly elided.
It was from my mother that I learned reading was not a duty but a reward, and from her that I intuited a vital truth: most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and...
It always amazed me how little he understood what I was feeling. It meant, among other things, that my understanding of him probably wasn’t much better.
I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father use...
Here was a wish from another lifetime, granted twenty-five years too late, as if God were in a place so distant that it took almost forever for wishes to travel there, like pale starlight from a dista...