The old house had a thousand doors in it.All old houses do. You can see them if you know how to look: the noontime shadow of a windowpane crawling with intent across a floor; unmeasured...

Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can’t tell stories about certain characters because someone...

Time falls on us, like rain, it falls like rain until we drown in it, and sometimes, it’s like the drains overflow, and time just – pools up, it seeps, it gathers in the corners.

He took me down and out into the afterlife of the brightly lit streets, a haze of rain around each streetlight like a galaxy, the whole street a universe spread out like a banquet.

We used to make gods, and we used to make sacrifices to them, and they would reward us. We’re still doing it and we still makes the sacrifices – I don’t know how many cows...

He’d wanted to – he didn’t know. Break bottles. Break windows, crash cars. Burn down the world. Find solace at the bottom of countless more bottles of wine, this time consumed in solitude. In the...

The skyscrapers of the city had finished scraping all the sky away, and the clouds overhead were exactly the color of concrete and I was safe and cold in a canyon of glass and steel.

I try asking him some more questions, but it’s like talking to voice mail.

He found, using fifty stones to keep track, that he could easily remember the names of all fifty states, and he knew the capitols of a lot of them. He knew his times tables all...

He’d grown unused to woods like this. He’d become accustomed to the Northwest, evergreen and shaded dark. Here he was surrounded by soft leaves, not needles; leaves that carried their deaths secretly inside them, that...

[…] I’d wake up in the middle of the night to the Star-Spangled Banner and some old film of a flag blowing in the wind, telling you the day was over and it was long...

What’s a reputation for, if not for proceeding oneself?