My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless--a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plast...
She had six months at most left to live. She had cancer, she hissed. A filthy growth eating her insides away. There was an operation, she'd been told. They took half your stomach out and fitted you up with a plastic bag. Better a semicolon than a ful...
Bad news doesn't hurt as much, if you hear it in good company. It's like, if somebody pushes you out of a 5th floor window and you bounce off an awning, a car roof, and a pile of plastic garbage bags before you smash onto the pavement, you've got a p...
I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and l...
We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and t...
Here is how the harmful becomes profitable: That which yesterday was reviled today ends up in Urban Outfitters. The critic Rebecca Solnit has summarized it this way: 'Eat your heart out on a plastic tray,' say the Sex Pistols. Now, we know where to b...
George unhinged his jaw and coughed up a little plastic bottle filled with chewable vitamins. "You're kidding," I said. "Are those Minotaur-shaped?" Hermes picked up the bottle and rattled it. "The lemon ones, yes. The grape ones are Furies, I think....
I stopped rowing for a moment to glug down some water, but it was warm, tasted of plastic, and failed to refresh. I yearned for an ice-cold drink—preferably one with bubbles and alcohol in it.
All of them are the same type; girls with overprocessed hair and too much makeup and way too much access to Daddy’s credit cards. Girls who, if you took away the designer labels, hair dye and cover-up, wouldn’t be more than average-looking, but w...
In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember me, if only for a few more minutes in the vast silent waiting ...
Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! ...
Everyone eventually winds up writing about themselves - the problem is finding the best way to go about it. To write about oneself literally, in the first person, presumes a more interesting personal life and philosophy than most rock lyricists posse...
Today I’ve prepared for you a selection of plastic-wrapped charcuterie, featuring a rustic gastrique of artisanal pig anuses and a decadent mélange of mechanically separated chicken,” he said in the style of the chefs on all those cooking compet...
We buy a bottle of water in the city, where clean water comes out in its taps. You know, back in 1965, if someone said to the average person, 'You know in thirty years you are going to buy water in plastic bottles and pay more for that water than for...
As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where ...
Everyone should wake up and have a fresh-squeezed orange every day. By having a fresh glass of orange juice with American oranges, you are supporting the local economy, you have all the vitamin C you need in a day, and you support the environment bec...
Jordan Belfort: See those little black boxes? They're called telephones. I'm gonna let you in on a little secret about these telephones. They're not gonna dial themselves. Okay? Without you, they're just worthless hunks of plastic. Like a loaded M16 ...
I think 'G.I. Joe' is a perfect example of how I'm the world's worst businessman. If I were smart, I'd be writing 'World War Z Part 12', but I have to go where the muse leads, and I've always been a huge 'G.I. Joe' fan. I always wanted to know more a...
the brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imaginati...
If this had been a public-school locker room, there would have been some gray jumbo-sized garbage cans nearby, and I probably could've taken care of cleanup by myself. But apparently the girls of St. Andrew's don't throw anything away, because all th...
American dream, a spouse, a brace of children, cuddly pets, coffee-table books, rusted skeleton keys, plastic cauliflower bags, business cards of business-card printers, a mound of used airmail envelopes. Old house on moving day, all echoes and lonel...
