The girl was a labyrinth to him; only by chance and error did he ever stumble blindly into her heart.
Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.
A few other couples joined us on the dance floor and we lost ourselves among them. I’d never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since high school, with gripping my partner to me, letting out awkward breaths against her ear, and tipping from foot to foot like someone waiting for a bus. I could feel the sweat cooling on her forearms and smell a trace of apples in her hair.
Was it even possible to forgive the dead? Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner? I had made a promise to someone who would never see it kept. I wanted to respect my grandfather’s wish, and it would have been no trouble to evade my mother’s question. Keeping secrets was the family business. But it was a business, it seemed to me, that none of us had ever profited from.
The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth’s gravity and all it’s analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place.
I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young.
Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake.
You could almost see the idea elbowing its way around the inside of his mind, like Athena in the cranium of Zeus.
Sammy felt... that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving. He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel.
Naomi was a tough kid, so much tougher than Landsman ever needed to be. She was two years younger, close enough for everything Landsman did or said to constitute a mark that must be surpassed or a theory to disprove. She was boyish as a girl and mannish as a woman. When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, “In everything but sexual preference.
She had been an exhausting woman to love. But he had loved her no less passionately for the hard work.
The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.
I don’t save lives,” Zelikman said. “I just prolong their futility.
She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack. When.
Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation.
The fundamental purpose of storytelling is to pass the time, which is infinite, slow, and weighs heavy in our hands. When the first storyteller, having told the first story, fell silent, somebody sitting there by the fire said, “Then what happened?” and the Age of Sequels began.
Now, watching the old priest comfort the dying man in low, musical Latin, my grandfather felt some inner tether come unlashed. His cheeks burned. His eyes stung. For the first and only time in his life, he felt the beauty that inhered in the idea of Jesus Christ, in the message of comfort that had managed to survive, reasonably intact, despite having been so thoroughly corrupted and profaned over the past two thousand years by Christians.
The confirmed stick-in-the-mud will always fall victim to the interventions of other people acting on impulse, because if habit is his religion, then his Satan is change, and in the end, we are all prey to temptation.
Over the years I’d surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions.
I agreed to keep the cards a secret and asked my grandmother if she believed in magic. She said she did not but that, surprisingly, magic worked even if you did not believe in it.