Most of the people in the audience were white and old. They had the gaunt look of people who have seen all the important movies and can now only look forward to reruns.
What if I’ve died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you’re locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it?
Every child is a packet of disappointments, hurts, dangers.
To ask a child to feel sympathy for the poor is harder than getting him to feel sympathy for a chicken or a goat—at least you can see a goat being slaughtered.
Like men who have failed together, they wanted nothing more than to never see each other again.
Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present.
Artists, who are selfish people, become anxious around the self-sacrificing
‘This Is Not That Dawn’ is remarkable in part for its careful and sensitive attention to women’s lives – and also for its harsh critique of men and their failure to stop violence.
The thing about a failure is that it is possible to deny it forever.
When you’ve finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.