I’m only telling you on the truth,” he said. “If you can’t stand the truth, don’t ask for it.
We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.
Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same.
That’s what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.
Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody’s perfect.
The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth.
Pain’s nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get.
They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick’ll be able to reach in and grab his heart.
We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.
It was as if they wanted to take their older bodies and put their younger hearts inside.
Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.
There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it.
The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.
…and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.
All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can’t eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.
Harry had worked his way through the American Dream and come to the conclusion that is was composed of a good lunch and a deep red wine that could soar.
Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.
The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no
Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn’t matter — it was non ov those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.
His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom.
There are no days more full than those we go back to.
They say ol’ man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He’s the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart.
The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.
I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.
And there are moments that I would like to know what might have happened if it hadn’t happened, and why it happened the way it did, and what it might have taken to prevent it from happening.
We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.
The further away we got from 9/11, the more I wanted to find some way to recover. I wanted to talk about the more anonymous corners of the city, because I think it’s very important that not all of that anger was turned to revenge.