She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn't...
Let’s all try to be fearless, sometimes we wish for the most perfect of outcomes and we arrive at the most unforgettable. Life can be scary and leave us hiding, but when we come out of hiding, we may realize, that life was the one thing that we cou...
Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn't stick with your original idea of paradise? People's lives were a mess.
When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?
She had been grief stricken as her father lay dying but now she felt weightless, the way people do when they're no longer sure they have a reason to be connected to this world. The slightest breeze could have carried her away, into the night sky, acr...
During the day I would move my body to the rhythm that only I could hear. I would try and connect with everything in my surroundings thinking that it somehow connected to who I was and was secretly sending me messages about what was in my soul.
The way she’d whispered this told him she was thinking about some of her less favorite attributes and how she could never see herself viewing them as assets. Women were so fucking hard on themselves. “Bailey, you are who you are, like no other. E...
Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a s...
Naturally, I do blame Françoise. I blame her for having N in the first place. She was young, she was beautiful, she was married to a doctor, and she was intelligent. She could have abstained from producing her first son. It was wrong on a variety of...
My mother's death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul.
This dame might take the phrase “If looks could kill” too literally. The French have a word for sexy murderesses. Well, they probably have such a word, but since I don’t speak French, I can’t tell you what it is.
I’ve never been on a bike,” I say. “I mean, I’ve been on a bike but not a motorcycle.” “And why is that?” he asks. “Bugs. They get in your mouth, right? That’s just gross.” Chris makes a face. “If you ride around with your mouth...
Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?
I speak to maps. And sometimes they something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that co...
M. de Charlus persisted in not replying. I thought I could see a smile flicker about his lips: the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men.
I came from Thailand for you, because Mia said she could probably get you here. I'd have come from Zimbabwe, Outer Mongolia, or a prison in Central America. In truth, I came through hell getting here....because for me that's anywhere you're not.
Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a tim...
Why, of course, if the reader were smart enough, he could figure the whole thing through after just the first few pages! But in his heart Arthur knew that his readers didn't really want to win. They wanted to test their wits against the author at ful...
I was not weak; I did not cry. But it hurt me, more in a kind of refreshing, thrilling way, than a kind of pain that would cripple me and send me away crying. My fingernails dug into the palms of my hands, and my teeth bit into my lips, my knees were...
I've always liked rooms where the party hasn't started yet...I love the feeling that anything could happen. After the party, when anything already has happened, there's usually the inevitable fact to face that anything wasn't all you'd hoped it to be...
Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.