How can she explain to him that every tear takes her further and further away from the box of razors that lies between them. How can she explain that she is terrified of such a thing happening. That although she thought she wanted freedom from her im...
Sometimes in the company of others I find a disagreeable spirit of competitiveness kicks in and each person is shamed into spending rather more than he would have wished. This is a historically established syndrome, of course. One Magus going to Beth...
One day, back when I working at a video store, a woman accompanied by her two small sons walked up the counter with a tape box displaying a man slicing off someone’s head with a chainsaw. “Does this have any sex in it?” she asked. In my mind, i...
Restoring order of my personal universe suddenly seemed imperative, as I refolded my T-shirts, stuffed the toes of my shoes with tissue paper, and arranged all the bills in my secret stash box facing the same way, instead of tossed in sloppy and wild...
Heroes are important. Heroes tell us who we want to be but when they made this particular hero they didn’t give him a gun, they gave him a screwdriver to fix things. They didn’t give him a tank or a warship or an X-Wing, they gave him a call box ...
What if love and reality are big things, so big that we can only ever see a tiny bit and we think we’re seeing the whole thing, but the whole thing is so vast that there is no way from our small place in the universe to see it all? What about that?...
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 constra...
Spring had come finally and after much hesitation, to Lincoln's Inn Fields and there were daffodils out upon the green grass and gilly-flowers blooming in the window-boxes of the ground floor sets. This being Lincoln's Inn, where an air of general se...
It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Ba...
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone ...
The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imaginati...
Even religious people are vulnerable to this longing. Those who belong to communities of faith have acquired a certain patience with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive themselves. They do not expect their instit...
The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles - preferably of his own making - in order to triumph. A hero without a flaw is of no interest to an audience or to the universe,...
Nearly everyone has had a box of secret pain, shared with no one. Will [Hamilton] had concealed his well, laughed loud, exploited perverse virtues, and never let his jealousy go wandering [...] He was always on the edge, trying to hold on to the rim ...
/.../he was asked to march to the front hall and retrieve his backpack. He did so with the energy of a convicted killer on his way to the execution chamber. Harold's backpack was an encyclopedia of boyhood interests and suggested that Harold was well...
Samantha: [as the family leaves their house for the last time before moving] Goodbye, yard! Goodbye, crepe myrtle! Goodbye, mailbox! Goodbye, box of stuff Mommy won't let us take with us but we don't want to throw away. Goodbye, house, I'll never lik...
[Roberta Sparrow finds her mailbox empty and walk back to her house, only to turn around halfway] Sean Smith: Oh, wait, wait, wait. She goes - She's going back to the box. We may still have mail. Ronald Fisher: Mail, mail, mail. Sean Smith: Here it i...
Dr. Gonzo: Cows are gonna kill me. Bisexuals are gonna kill me. Let's get out of here. Where's the elevator? Raoul Duke: No! Fuck! Don't go near the elevator, man, that's just what they want us to do. Trap us in a steel box, take us down to the basem...
Wray: Did you find what was in the pocket? Cherry: Fuck no. Wray: Look for it. Cherry: [searches through one pocket] Wray: No, the other one. Cherry: [searches through the other pocket and takes out a box with a ring inside it] Wray: I was gonna give...
[Kate is trying to get a ticket to go to Dallas, Ed is trying to board the plane] Man in Airport: Come on, Irene, they're boarding. Woman in Airport: This girl is offering us our first class ticket... if we go Friday plus a ring, a watch, a pocket tr...
Father Horvak: What's confusing you this week? Frankie Dunn: Oh, it's the same old "one God-three God" thing. Father Horvak: Frankie, most people figure out by kindergarten it's about faith. Frankie Dunn: Is it sort of like Snap Crackle and Pop, all ...
