The shame and disorder in his house were like the shame and disorder in his head.
You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen.
Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person’s, and singularities like this are where you find eternity.
She didn’t need to see more people, she took money from hundreds of people at the bakery, men who stared at her indecently, old women who tweezed coins from cloth pouches as if picking a nose with thumb and finger.
Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?” “I’m a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I’m poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.
Walking is broken falls, the body leaning, the legs advancing to catch it.
I guess I was just trying to say that the Internet is good at satisfying needs from a distance. Male or female.
That everything in the society actually revolves about women, not men. The men are all looking at pictures of women, and the women are all communicating with other women.
We girls are supposed to at least have these amazing sexual powers, but in my recent experience this is just a lie told by men to make them feel better about having ALL the power.
A silence fell. Frogs in the night were calling, calling, calling.
Kluger notes that these cases arguably amount to “personal injury claims in disguise,” and that the Supreme Court has ruled that federal cigarette-labeling laws are an effective shield against such claims. Logically, in other words, the states ought to be suing smokers, not cigarette makers. And perhaps smokers, in turn, ought to be suing Social Security and private pension funds for all the money they’ll save by dying early.
What happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?
She’d been drinking jug wine steadily for four hours.
No one stays haunted by a person they’re not still in love with.
In a decadent society people can slowly drift or slowly be drawn by the culture of commerce into yearning for violence. Maybe people have a deep congenital awareness that no civilization lasts forever, that the most peaceful prosperity will someday have to end, or maybe it’s just human nature.
Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.
The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who’d ever truly listened to them.
It was this other side of Avery – the fact that he so visibly had an other side – that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.
He wasn’t constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world.
The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter fully deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it. He.