The white façades of the villas and apartment houses were like blocks of time that had crystallised beside the road.
...the arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.
She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.
Strangman shrugged theatrically. "It ," he repeated with great emphasis. "Let's admit that. It makes it more interesting—particularly for Kerans. ' One of the few existential absolutes, far more significant than 'To be or not to be?', which merely ...
The trouble with you people is that you've been here for thirty million years and your perspectives are all wrong. You miss so much of the transitory beauty of life.
To his surprise he felt a moment of regret, of sadness that his quest for his mother and father would soon be over. As long as he searched for them he was prepared to be hungry and ill, but now that the search had ended he felt saddened by the memory...
His mother and father were agnostics, and Jim respected devout Christians in the same way that he respected people who were members of the Graf Zeppelin Club or shopped at the Chinese department stores, for their mastery of an exotic foreign ritual. ...
Jim knew that he was awake and asleep at the same time, dreaming of the war and yet dreamed of by the war.
All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by...
The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds, so that they formed outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield were doing...
Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance.
He methodically basted the dark skin of the Alsatian, which he had stuffed with garlic and herbs. "One rule in life", he murmured to himself. "If you can smell garlic, everything is all right".
However, for all his affection and loyalty towards the animal, the dog would soon be leaving him - they would both be present at a celebratory dinner when they reached the roof, he reflected with a touch of gallows-humour, but the poodle would be in ...
First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriag...
They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed.
He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother.
A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup.
All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the...
In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.
...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.
She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless—an interesting logic was at work there.
