We looked at each other for a minute, not saying anything, but I could feel the air between us shift. It became thick, sultry, and tangible—like when the air changes right before a storm. I could feel its power envelop me as it brushed across my sk...
You could not presume that people were healthy. You could not presume that they would welcome the little nudges and jostlings of life. You had to behave as though everyone you met was walking a thin wire far above the earth, where the slightest wind ...
After school the very next day, El Rey's mobile home was gone. I laid in bed and wondered what happens to people when they go, if they become like shadows, if they fade away when they disappear from your life. The only thing I could see was the broke...
Fighting with Harper stirred his blood, and walking out on her had only intensified his need, as though the brief separation was more than he could bear. All he could think about was getting back to her. Undressing her. And fucking her until he worke...
I could go on like this forever, but would I ever find a place that was meant for me? Like, for example, where? After lengthy considerations, the only place I could think of was the cockpit of a two-seater Kamikaze torpedo-plane. Of all the dumb idea...
The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior to anything we coul...
George stared at the dove. What would she say if she could speak to him? What would she wish for, for her father? For she, too, had been harmed by a man who had meant to show his utmost love for her. It made George wonder why love was suppose to be s...
Violence is already active here; it is built into the very structure od the existing society. If we seek a world in which men do the least possible violence to each other (which is to state just the negative of it), then we are committed not simply t...
Bone Daddy. That's what they called him. A walking talking well-hung pleasure factory who, with a few easy orgasms, could bring you whatever your heart desired. Your boyfriend would propose, your boss would give you a raise. Rumor had it he could hea...
I'd just killed some of the best riders in the world - and I was clean. I'd taken nothing - no EPO, no cortisone, no testosterone, no painkillers, no caffeine. I had justified to myself that I was a great rider without drugs - yet perversely given my...
He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folde...
Actual message in letter I mailed: Congrats on getting married! Here’s a hundred-dollar gift certificate to Amazon.com. You could buy something practical, or you could buy 101 copies of my .99 cents ebook. Just kidding—I didn’t mean to imply th...
Hatred. Something almost as physical as walls, pianos, or nurses. She could almost touch the destructive energy leaking out of her body. She allowed the feeling to emerge, regardless of whether it was good or bad; she was sick of self-control, of mas...
The place trembled with sound. I didn't need to do anything. They would do it all. But you had to be careful. Drunk as they were they could immediately detect any false gesture, any false word. You could never underestimate an audience. They had paid...
In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state. Nobody can feel too much, though many of us wor...
Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down ...
I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Y...
I didn't want to be in the teeming mass of the working class.[...] I didn't want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape - but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape ...
I wanted to tell her to never change, to never let her heart get trampled down and hard. But she’d remember that, too. And right now she didn’t know that there was any other way to be. That her heart, her soul, could ever be anything other than s...
If I could understand everything the way I do now, I could make it all--and then it just stopped. Leaving me with that feeling like when you figure out something brilliant and profound in a dream, but you wake up, and all you remember is that you kne...
Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely desc...
