Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy from (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its...

A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.

Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s...

Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too...

Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.

Perhaps they didn’t know they were at sea. Was there a certain percentage of people at sea who lacked the knowledge that they were at sea?

It was hard not to realize what kind of kid his parents wished they’d had, and when he thought about that kind of kid it was tempting for Paul to want to track, hunt, and...

Like most doctors, the fanciest ones, he seemed offensively healthy, as if he kept the real secret of vitality to himself. He would live forever and people would crumble and die around him. You were...

Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …

My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else.

The true elitists in the literary world are the ones who have become annoyed by literary ambition in any form, who have converted the very meaning of ambition so totally that it now registers as...

Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren’t.

We shared a daughter? I’d not thought about it that way before. If we shared a daughter, and something happened to Claire, then I would not have to hare Esther with her anymore. I would...

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?

Thomas’s mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral...

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

Verbalize someone’s actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between...