My rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done.
My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own.
Maybe it doesn't matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself.
Liberal? Hosh-kosh nonsense!’ No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thi...
Janet Jackson kicked off this curious phenomenon, Madonna continued it, Beyoncé is its apex. Here dancing is intended as a demonstration of the female will, a concrete articulation of its reach and po...
It was the season of sex, yes, but it was also, in all the vital ways, without sex itself—and isn’t that one useful definition of a happy girlhood? I didn’t know or appreciate this aspect of my luck u...
It was during this time that Archie learnt the true power of do-it-yourself, how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives, how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with him...
It just goes to show,’ said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on th...
It had to do with emotion. Whatever I was feeling I was able to express very clearly, I could put it over.
In the university prospectus, an italic script over a picture of the Firth of Forth: Philosophy is learning how to die. Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you h...
In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a friendship that takes as its basis phys...
In America we are perhaps more accustomed to art that enacts the boredom of life with a side order of that (by now) overfamiliar Warholian nihilism.
In 1822 freed American slaves (known as Americo-Liberians, or, colloquially, Congos) founded the colony at the instigation of the American Colonization Society, a coalition of slave owners and politic...
If novelists know anything it's that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certai...
IT’S NOT FAIR! I CAN’T GO ON HAJJ. I’VE GOT TO GO TO SCHOOL. I DON’T HAVE TIME TO GO TO MECCA. IT’S NOT FAIR! Welcome to the twentieth century. It’s not fair. It’s never fair.
I'm serious. I don't know how you work like that. My school shit is better organized, and I'm not in the business of World Domination.
I'm not sure if you're the person for me any more.
I'd decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.
I was completely unreachable, for the first time in years. It gave me an unexpected but not unpleasant sense of stillness, of being outside of time: it reminded me somehow of childhood.
I thought it odd that my father should travel eight miles to Lambert's for comfort when Lambert seemed already to have suffered the kind of abandonment my father feared so badly