Maybe, when you hear the name “Beverly,” you think of Beverly Hills–people wandering the streets with their heads shot off by money.

Animals had returned to what was left of the forest…clusters of orange butterflies exploded off the blackish purple piles of bear sign and winked and fluttered magically like leaves without trees. More bears than people...

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.

Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the...

With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I’d been thinking, all...

He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.

When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn’t my...

The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached… I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew...

Harold’s Bow and FoodBowl bowl bowl bowlFood food food foodThe miracle of the heavenly restaurantI mouth thisgreat dark sad eveningSuddenly they come for me in a limousineHow could I have believed I was vanquishedI never...

I feel very privileged to hear how somebody used to run around stickin’ people up and stealing cars, and now they’re gettin’ their life back together… I just love the stories. The stories of the...

When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all...

Sometimes what I wouldn’t give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.

. . . things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.

Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then...

At the sight of the flag he tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States...

It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he’d reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear...

The Americans won’t win. They’re not fighting for their homeland. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to fight awhile and then leave.

We live in the post-trash, man. It’ll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity’s leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there’s been...

The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in—as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around...

She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she’d done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only...

When I reached the street I didn’t know whether to go right or left. Soon I’d have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.