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.
I feel like my head is finally the right size. I feel like it finally fits around my mind.
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?
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...
Is it possible to be wiser on the page than you are in life? I'm hoping so.
I sensed that almost all of them knew they didn't have much more time on earth. Maybe this accounted for their willingness to pitch in with strangers and form a neighborhood.
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.
People, including types that I didn’t like much at all but felt I had something to learn or to gain from.
What is it in people, or just in people like me, that would rather let a lie go by, would rather wish it away or minimize it, than point it out and cause the liar embarassment?
Their throat muscles shifted sharply when they spoke, as if separately manufacturing each word.
The lines we draw that make us who we are are potent by virtue of being non-negotiable, and even, at some level, indefensible.
Spirit was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us but flowed outward from our movements.
Sometimes I wondered if my problem was liking too many different kinds of
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.
If I had to pick between knowing just a little about a lot of folks and knowing everything about a few, I'd opt for the long, wide-angle shot, I think.
I understood that no one lives forever, but there are certain people whose power and presence so thoroughly penetrate your view of things that contemplating their absence feels as strange as imagining...
A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns...
Who all these people, so many of them brown? What this ritual unfolding around him? I've never seen a German look as German as Clark did when he assessed his likely assessors. His eyes were like sm...
Though I no longer liked him or respected him, the thought of his disapproval frightened me.