Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.
I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.
I'd forgotten this about women: so many conditions. A man shouldn't take them to heart, and yet he does, because he doesn't want to be alone.
I just wasn't ready for his stories. They'd breed with the others I'd heard and hatch new monsters, because there was no such thing as separation here, not once you'd started listening. Never listen.
How soon human beings forget what a privilege it is to live in freedom. A privilege, not an honor. An honor would mean we deserved it. We do not.
He looked like a being who'd voyaged back through time from a world that had overcome illness, pain, and conflict.
People, including types that I didn’t like much at all but felt I had something to learn or to gain from.
We're a telephone family, strung out along the wires, sharing our news in loops and daisy chains. We don't meet face-to-face much, and when we do there's a dematerialized feeling, as though only half...
To apologize for your personal absolutes, for what Sandy Pinter calls your Core Attachments, means apologizing for your very existence.
Their throat muscles shifted sharply when they spoke, as if separately manufacturing each word.
Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.
She was already dead, but we were starved for followers and stupefied by the elixir of our own heroism, and so we pretended words could resurrect her.
Men who turn their faith into a business owe all of us a steak dinner now and then.
It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
I sensed the presence of wizened bachelor potters working in sheds behind their mothers’ houses.
I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
He lived in two modes, the apparent and the veiled, and in two realms, the opera and the sewer, and he shuttled between them like a genie.
Central Wyoming was like hell without the flames, an underworld thrust up onto the surface.
What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?
This was all our world was made of: decomposed visions. Not atoms --- bits of dreams.