Zugzwang. It’s when you have no good moves. But you still have to move.
As he played it off to Nat, Archy knew – felt, like the baby-shaped ache in his left arm – that neither his ability nor his willingness to care for Rolando English for an hour, a day, a week, had anything whatsoever to do with his willingness or ability to be a father to the forthcoming child now putting the finishing touches on its respiratory and endocrine systems in the dark laboratory of his wife’s womb. Wiping.
Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur.
Sometimes I fear to write, even in fictional form, about things that really happened to me, about things that I really did, or about the numerous unattractive, cruel, or embarrassing thoughts that I have at one time or another entertained. Just as often, I find myself writing about disturbing or socially questionable acts and states of mind that have no real basis in my life at all, but which, I am afraid, people will quite naturally attribute to me when they read what I have written.
Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed.
Such regrets would come only belatedly, a few days after, when he made the realization that death really did mean that you were never going to see the dead person ever again. What he regretted most of all just now was simply that he had not been there when it happened; that he had left to his mother, grandfather, and brother the awful business of watching his father die.
What is the meaning of it, Watson?” said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.
Of all the tricks played by storytellers on their willing victims, the cheapest is the deception known in English as The End. An ending is an arbitrary thing, an act of cowardice or fatigue, an expedient disguised as an aesthetic choice or, worse, a moral commentary on the finitude of life.
Taking pains, working hard, not flaunting his or her chops so much as relying on them, the pop artisan teeters on a fine fulcrum between the stern, sell-the-product morality of the workhorse and the artist’s urge to discover a pattern in, or derive a meaning from, the random facts of the world.
Kornblum was, nevertheless, unable to resist offering that final criticism to his erstwhile pupil on his performance that night. “Never worry about what you are escaping from,” he said. “Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.
He was glad to have been wakened, contemptuous as ever of the happiness to be found in dreams, displeased with himself for having fallen prey to it once again.
I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born,” Flowers said. “They’re like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.
He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much – indeed to revolve around him – could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all.
All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, readers, parents, and educators, the spatial constraints that he had been struggling against in the pages of Luna Moth, seemed capable of being completely overcome, exceeded, and escaped. The Amazing Cavalieri was going to break free, forever, of the nine little boxes.
I thought I smelled an early hint of the mysterious bittersweet gas that fills Pittsburgh in the summertime, a smell at once industrial and aboriginal, river water and sulfur dioxide, burning tires and the coat of a fox.
She can’t go in there,” he says firmly. “It isn’t appropriate.” “See this, sweetness?” Bina has fished out her badge. “I’m like a cash gift. I’m always appropriate.
He checks with the mandolin man on the roof; there is always a man on the roof with a semiautomatic mandolin.
One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing.
He understood we were there because we were afraid he might die when no one was in the room. He had promised us that he would cling to life, in spite of pain and all cancers primary and secondary, until at last, one day, the doorbell would ring, somebody would have gone to the toilet, and we would be forced in spite of our precautions to leave him unattended. Then, and only then, would he permit himself to die.
A great feat of engineering is an object of perpetual interest to people bent on self-destruction.
Julie, with two disappointing years of fencing lessons in his recent past, had the advantage of knowing what to do with a sword if you actually held one, while Titus had the advantage that he always would have: The whole thing was his idea. He was the one causing things to happen, driving them, taking them seriously long enough and intensely enough – and in public – to make them somehow be.