Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.
A category 5 hurricane carries an explosive force several times greater than that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
Cruelty and sentimentality are almost always companion characteristics in an individual but never cruelty and love.
When you love somebody, you give up making decisions just for yourself.
Cancer and lightning go where they want. So does political corruption.
Tomorrow has no more existence than yesterday, but you can always control now. We live in a series of nows. Think about now.
Baptized Christians ran the ovens in the camps.
There are those who are made different in the womb.
Mexico was not a country, Krill thought. It was a revolution that had never stopped.
I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel.
I wanted to believe he was mad. Unfortunately, I no longer knew what madness was.
Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I.
You pull on dat ’gator’s tail, he gonna clean your kneecaps, him.
Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept the life you had planned was a dream written on water.
As with all megalomaniacs, he had no handles. He was the type of man the Spanish call sin dios, sin verguenza, without God or shame.
If you’re wired a certain way, you’ll always be in morion, clicking to your own rhythm, all of it in four-four time, avoiding convention and predictability and control as you would a sickness, the whole world waiting for you like an enormous dance pavilion lit by colored lights and surrounded with palm trees. I’m not talking about the dirty boogie. The music of the spheres is right outside your bedroom window.
At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself – the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in every sunrise?
Not everybody gets to see a blinding light on the way to Damascus.
Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.
But the rain gods went away. They ain’t coming back, either.” “How do you know that?” “They got no reason to. We don’t believe in them no more.
Gamblers and lovers pay big dues and enjoy limited consolations. But sometimes they are enough.