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...
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...
So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy.
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.
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.
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...
They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving,
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...
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...
We do not want what's good for us.
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...
If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.
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...
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.
You get more misanthropic every day.- I get older every day. My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.
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...
Amazing, isn’t it, when you think about it, how the world keeps on turning, no matter how fucked up things get? In
But of course everything had conspired to spoil her entrance, which only went to prove what Janine already knew: that no matter how well you planned something, God always planned better. If He was fee...
He was an amiable man who believed in amiable solutions, who forgave easily and couldn’t understand that other people derived pleasure from withholding the very thing he always gave so freely.
Hell, at twenty, he’d been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more month...
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