He says, ‘I don’t know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that.”You don’t have to go to the party....

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

Beauty is a whore, I like money better.

I’m talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don’t quite look like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting...

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy’s other half.

Barret thinks- he thinks, briefly- of turning around and leaving the park; of being, this time, the vanisher, the man who leaves you wondering, who offers no explanation, not even the sour satisfaction of a...

Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.

Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

The song is an unvarnished love shout, an implorement tinged with…anger? Something like anger, but the anger of a philosoher, the anger of a pot. An anger directed at the transience of the world, at...

We worship numberless gods or idols, but we all need to be the grandest possible versions of ourselves, we need to walk across the face of the earth with as much grace and beauty as...

She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening, waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage...

Women are kind of screwed, in the world,” Andrew says.

How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she’d tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard’s kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with...

Yeah, there are gases and neutrinos and this shit they call dark matter.

Julian is bluff and sturdy, royal; he possesses a gracefully muscular, equine beauty so natural it suggests that beauty itself is a fundamental human condition and not a mutation in the general design.

This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining.

She has failed. She wishes she didn’t mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a...

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

I wanted a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my father’s daughter. I wanted to be loved by...

Tyler. His handsome, lion-eyed ravagement. His capacity for devotion. Which is so sexy. Why do so many gay men lack that? Why are they so distracted, so in love with the idea of more and...

She’d never been religious. She hadn’t allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.

I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.

I’m sure there are people who are content to run errands and report for work on time and wait, with an enlivening eagerness, for the lunch bell. I wish them well. They have, however, never...

I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along, hidden among the patterns in the...

There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

Here’s the sting of livingness. He’s back after his nightly voyage of sleep, all clarity and purpose; he’s renewed his citizenship in the world of people who strive and connect, people who mean business, people...

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes....

I see myself..in those pages as she goes back and forth, enjoying simply enjoying the beauties of the moments then chastising herself for having ‘no edge’ being simple and worse, harmless.

The point of sex is… Sex doesn’t have a point.

A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to nothingness because they’re so...

Laura po Kitty touží. Po její síle, po tom, jak věcně, pohodově přijímá všechna svá zklamání, po mihotavých růžovozlatých světlech její utajené osobnosti, po křehkých našamponovaných hlubinách jejích vlasů.

We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and...

Barrett is a bigger guy, not fat (not yet) but ursine, crimson of eye and lip; ginger-furred, possessed (he likes to think) of an enchanted sensual slyness, the prince transformed into wolf or lion, all...

How are you feeling, man?” he asks me.”Great,” I tell him, and it is purely the truth. Doves clatter up out of a bare tree and turn at the same instant, transforming themselves from steel...

It’s remarkable, being alive.

Maybe – let’s not rule it out – this will be the song that cuts clean, the one that matters, the one that sheds standard-issue romance and reveals, under its old skin, a raw blood-red...

Man,” he said, “I’m not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want.””What do we want?” I asked blurrily.”Aw, man, you know,” he said....

Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.

Which is probably one of the reasons those of us who love contemporary fiction love it as we do. We’re alone with it. It arrives without references, without credentials we can trust. Givers of prizes...

You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.

Love is deep, a mystery – who wants to understand its every particular?

She’s had a long life. Now she’s going to the Lord.” “Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that,” Simon said. “It shouldn’t. If you don’t like ‘Lord,’ pick another...

There are times when you don’t belong and you think you’re going to kill yourself. Once I went to a hotel. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my...

This is what you do. You make a future for yourself out of the raw material at hand.

Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared...

A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love.

I was living my own future and my brother’s lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might...

She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

This, Barrett Meeks, is your work. You witness, and compile. You persevere.