If she was more curt with her own family than a homeless man this only suggested that generosity was not an infinite quantity and had to be employed strategically where it was most needed.
I will admit that in the past, when I have met connoisseurs, I’ve found it a bit hard to believe in them entirely. Philistinism often comes with a side order of distrust. How can this person possibly...
I was fourteen: the world was pain.
I thought of that William Gibson quote: The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
I felt a wonderful lightness in my body, a ridiculous happiness, it seemed to come from nowhere.
I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. You
How much longer on the divan? Why does sex have to mean everything? OK, it can mean something, but why everything? Why do thirty years have to go down the toilet because I wanted to touch somebody els...
How many times,’ Samad growled, after watching his son purchase the autobiography of Malcolm X, ‘is it necessary to say thank you in a single transaction? Thank you when you hand the book over, thank...
Here’s the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later. And then, twenty years after that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostal...
He smiles shyly at Leah. Aged ten he had a smile! Nathan Bogle: the very definition of desire for girls who had previously only felt that way about certain fragrant erasers. A smile to destroy the res...
He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is color-blind, by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color—to look past it—to...
He is a black man. He is often thought of as a nothing, a cipher. But he has layers upon layers upon layers.
He had an absolute empathy for everybody, Magid. And it was an unbelievable pain in the arse.
Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Faith is hard to achieve, easy to lose.
Faced with the same reality, we in the West tend to opt for a stiff drink instead. But people will insist upon shooting us sideways glances and saying things like, It’s two o’clock in the afternoon! a...
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel.
Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.