If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.

The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much....

Había leído lo bastante como para apreciar mi ingenio literario, pero no lo bastante como para identificar mis fuentes de conocimiento. Me encantan las mujeres así. Podía decirle cosas como: “La principal diferencia entre la...

Hell is hell because, there, evil passes unremarked upon.

People’re always buried facing west, so at the end of time when the Last Trumpet blows, all the dead people’ll claw their way up and walk due west to the throne of Jesus to be...

(…)si nos convencemos de que la humanidad puede trascender colmillos y garras, si nos convencemos de que las diversas razas y credos pueden compartir pacíficamente la tierra, (…)si nos convencemos de que los gobernantes deben...

The Revelation of Sonmi 451 To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences...

Have you noticed,” said John, “how countries call theirs ‘sovereign nuclear deterrents,’ but call the other countries’ ones ‘weapons of mass destruction’?

What?

Tokyo is a model of that serial big-bang theory of the universe. It explodes at five P.M. and people matter is hurled to the suburbs, but by 5 A.M. the people-matter gravity reasserts itself, and...

And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.

Patience’s design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless...

Answering the question ‘How would you like to smell?’ by saying ‘I’d rather I didn’t’ is also no longer acceptable. It’s not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic...

Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it.

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods’ conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror.”I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might...

Power. What do we mean? ‘The ability to determine another man’s luck.’ …how is it that some men attain mastery over others while the vast majority live and die as minions, as livestock? The answer...

Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.

Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. “Oy!” yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. “There’s a fackin’ queue!”Never apologize, advises Lloyd George....

Lying’s wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.

Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!”How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves...

I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.

A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant

Las autobiografías ya de por sí son infumables, ¡pero anda que las novelitas! Héroe emprende viaje, forastero llega a la ciudad, alguien persigue algo, lo consigue o no lo consigue, conflicto entre voluntades opuestas. “Admiradme,...

I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like...

Rootlessness,” I opine, “is the twenty-first century norm.””You’re not wrong and that’s why we’re in the shit we’re in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker’s toss about anywhere?

You only value something if you know it’ll end.

She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. “I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?

Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they...

The body is the outermost layer of the mind.

you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue.

Is peace of mind the co-workability of your laws?

Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you don’t fit in.

Teachers’re always using that “in your own words.” I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It’s their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How’re you s’posed...

One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards will be at one’s throat all the sooner.

… in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only “rights”, the only law, are whatever is willed...

The second law of survival states that there is no second law. Eat or be eaten. That’s it.

Un libro leído a medias es una aventura amorosa incompleta.

Your leaders must know powerful magic. Yes, said one of the women. The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Class Dialectics. It didn’t sound like very powerful magic to me.

Me and Vinny are dead careful, and we only had sex once without a condom, our first time, and it’s a scientific fact that virgins can’t get pregnant. Stella told me.

If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

La paz es como el cristal: si se golpea repetidamente, termina mostrando su fragilidad.

Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you’re afraid of them.

Finished in a frenzy that reminded me of our last night in Cambridge. Watched my final sunrise. Enjoyed a last cigarette. Didn’t think the view could be any more perfect until I saw that beat-up...

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don’t remember summer even saying goodbye.

If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.

As if Art is the What, not the How!