Don’t you ever get scared?” I ask. “Of what?” She says. “Of not being good enough.” “You mean at writing?” L’il asks. I nod. “What if I’m the only one who thinks I can do it and no one else does? What if I’m fooling myself-“...
With Pollution, emotion is irrelevant, it is not their nature,” Mearth sighed, making a face as if she were talking to an ignorant small child. “I didn’t create them, humans created the Pollution. Cheryl Nobel, Alecto Steele, Albert Sanders, Ol...
What makes you think it was your sperm? My sperm is obviously the dominant sperm. My sperm told your sperm to get to the back of line. The boy will have black hair and green eyes.” Sam shook his head. “I bet my sperm listens to your sperm just ab...
There are worse things than being thirty-five, single, and female in New York. Like: Being twenty-five, singled, and female in New York. It's a rite of passage few women would want to repeat. It's about sleeping with the wrong men, wearing the wrong ...
I had come to discover that "safe" was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let's-pretend, monsters and nightma...
What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been t...
I took [Kate's] hand in mine, and felt her fingers squeeze back. And I thought: home. It took me completely by surprise. But I suppose that once you bid farewell to your first home, you're always looking for another—that place where you can feel ha...
Unbeknownst to me, from the beginning of freshman year Rob and Oswaldo had been drawn away from Yale via their friends on the dining hall and custodial staffs, outward into the city of New Haven. Rob considered these excursions a much-needed dose of ...
Chabrias, ever preoccupied to offer the gods the worship due them, was disturbed by the progress of sects of this kind among the populace of large cities; he feared for the welfare of our ancient religions, which yoke men to no dogma whatsoever, but ...
He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city, He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a s...
A long time ago I lived in Lisbon,' she said, in softly slurred Portuguese that made the name of the city Leesh-boa. 'But before that, meus neto, my tribe was in the mountains where there are only old things, like the trees and the rocks and the stre...
My sister is there with, probably, the most dangerous people on this city! You have a little sister?” “No.” “Then you don’t have any right to tell me what I suposse to sacrifice if it’s for my sister’s sake!” “Owen...” “She’s ...
Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machin...
Once I had a wild fling on an otherwise boring weekend holiday in Edinburgh, with a guy I met who turned out to be a psychiatrist. He agreed with me, after hours and hours of our naked cavorting in a hotel, that I was a sex addict; although he did st...
Doubt was a giant-sized beast with heavy boots that pounded through the cities of the mind, sparking an occasional life only so Hope could rise again for a splendid recrushing. Doubt reveled in nothing more than destroying Hope. And Hope, being immor...
Cincinatti was where I learned that running away from your problems has a three-month statute of limitations, a lesson I have found repeatedly to be true. Three months is still a first impression -- of a city, of other people, of yourself in that pla...
I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesn't travel very far." "What stuff is that?" he'd asked her. "We're completely at ease being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads", she'd told him. Maybe that...
Dad and I leave town in the early dark. It's the second Sunday of the holidays, and we pack up the old blue car with enough clothes for summer and hit the road. It's so early he's wiping hills of sand piled in the corners of his eyes. I wipe a few te...
Night is the permanent revolution, that of the globe. Every sundown the streets change, becoming sinister or libidinous, or, for that matter, longer or narrower or unexpectedly twisted. The familiar rebels against those who presume to know it. The ma...
You'll lose." "What makes you so sure?" "You have no discipline. All you do is tear down shit down. My father is a bastard, but at least he builds things. You turn cities into smoking ruins and blunder about like some hyper child, smashing anything y...
Stacey muttered, "But I hate this school, and this city, and the sooner I leave, the better. I want to start over in a new place. I haven't . . ." her voice trailed off and she looked away from Jason, hoping instead to find her words among the fallin...
