A waitress, bringing Finkler more hot water, interrupted Treslove's answer. Finkler always asked for more hot water no matter how much hot water had already been brought. It was his way of asserting power, Treslove thought. No doubt Nietzsche, too, o...
You're dead," I repeated. "So why are you in my dream?" He raised the bill of his olive drab ball cap with one finger. " Good question. Morbid, isn't it?" "What?" "Dreaming about dead peolpe. Creepy. You ever see a therapist about that?" "I'm not -" ...
To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one ...
August said you row?” she asked. Her voice spilled over me like warm syrup. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the drugging sensation then realized she’d asked me a question. “Yeah,” I answered belatedly. Good. A short answer but it’s better than...
The imagined memories had to have as much weight as the real, or we had to at least pretend they did to such a degree that they just very well might have. And so I never questioned Angela about that particular story, or about all the troubling things...
What was in it for me? I wasn't asking for any sort of reciprocation, after all. Why didn't she want her erogenous zones stimulated? I have no idea. All I know is that you could, if you wanted to, find the answers to all sorts of difficult questions ...
One thing I've always wondered—why did you enter that bikini contest when you were a teenager?” Her face flushed with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “How far back did you trace me?” “Far enough.” A pause. “You didn't answer my qu...
I'm calm," Rachel insisted. "Every time I'm around you, some monsters attack us. What's to be nervous about?" "Look," I said. "I'm sorry about the band room. I hope they didn't kick you our or anything." "Nah. They asked me a lot of questions about y...
There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear a mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: 'Ou libéré?' Are you free, my daughter?" My grandmother quickly pressed her finger...
Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She'd believed in it once too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life. It took turns that people couldn't foresee or even understand, leaving a long trai...
Agnes: "I have a question for you, speaking of truth. You say God speaks the truth." Tóti: "Yes." Agnes: "And God said: 'Thou shalt not kill.' Tóti: "Yes. Tóti said carefully." Agnes: "Then Blondal and the rest are going against God. They're hypoc...
As the rain falls and the sun shines, they grow, grow, grow; minds so open, they go through life aware and accepting, seeing light where there's dark, seeing possibility in dead ends, tasting victory as others spit out failure, questioning where othe...
She didn't see him watching as he played, having no idea that Hans Hubermann's accordion was a story. In the times ahead, that story would arrive at 33 Himmel Street in the early hours of morning, wearing ruffled shoulders and a shivering jacket. It ...
Usually we walk around constantly believing ourselves. "I'm okay" we say. "I'm alright". But sometimes the truth arrives on you and you can't get it off. That's when you realize that sometimes it isn't even an answer--it's a question. Even now, I won...
If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
Did you ever spell a word so bad that your spell check has absolutely no clue what you're trying to spell? What do you end up getting, you end up getting, like, a question mark. You got a million dollars of technology just looking back at you like, '...
I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar,' she said, and then thought a bit. 'Sometimes we'll buy pretzels as a splurge.' It crossed my mind that the world's most efficient psychological evaluation would ha...
She was a nightmare of beauty and menace living right there above them, a being part raptor, part human, part divine. She knew without question that she could sweep down on them and inflict upon all of them a terrible vengeance if she wished. She had...
To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yo...
Straight people don't have to come out, as heterosexuality is assumed. [...] Young straight people are less likely to question the choices that their families and societies are attempting to make for them. [...]A lot of straight people move through l...
It has often been said that the more unusual the murder the easier it is to solve, but this is a theory I don't believe. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple, and you should think of your investigations as a complicated experiment: look at what remains...
