Too much engenders too much.
How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing?
When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.
For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set.
You don’t know the connection? You don’t know that every privilege in your life and every thought in your mind depends on the ability of the two great powers to hang a threat over the planet?
The ruins stood above the hissing traffic like some monument to doomed expectations.
I feel like an overwritten paragraph.
The long soft life is what I feel I’m settling into and the only question is how deadly it will turn out to be. But.
Rain turned to sleet, sleet to snow.
He had ambitions on my behalf and more or less at my expense. This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.
This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.
When hell fills up, the dead will walk the streets.
You don’t think of the tape as boring or interesting. It is crude, it is blunt, it is relentless. It is the jostled part of your mind, the film that runs through your hotel brain under all the thoughts you know you’re thinking.
Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?
In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beggars, touts, flower-sellers, those who watch over your shoes for a couple of weightless coins.
She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets.
He was waiting for a man with a knife to come out of a doorway at him. All this time, he told me, he had been trying to steal death from her body. By confronting it himself, he would keep it away from her.
Traffic was stopped dead and I nudged the window switch and listened to the blowing horns approach peak volume. We were trapped in our own obsessive clamor.
She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness.
Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed my mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in upper rows.