Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.
It was like preparing a pharaoh for his death and burial.
She intended to meet her own end with senses intact, grasp it, know it finally, open herself to the mystery that others mistake for something freakish and unspeakable.
She was herself with Brian, whatever that meant. She knew what it meant. Less enveloped in someone else's figuration, his self-conscious shaping of a life.
She was feeling pretty good. She felt lazy-daisy, you know. You know the way something's been nagging and dragging and then it gets unexpectedly sort of settled.
It brings personal voices into your life that you're not prepared to deal with.
He studied the other half as if someone had just handed it to him on a crowded street.
A wife is the only thing that can save guys like us. But they don't make you feel any younger.
Maybe we can know God through love or prayer or through visions or through LSD but we can't know him through the intellect.
Marvin did not think these men were interested in photos of wolf packs on the tundra at sunset.
We ran along city streets, landscaped avenues of a certain fallen aura, an out-of-timeness that was ravishing in its open regret.
Bronzini didn't own a car, didn't drive a car, didn't want one, didn't need one, wouldn't take one if somebody gave it to him. Stop walking he thought, and you die.
Bronzini walked over and took up a position next to George and they stood without speaking for a long moment in the odd solidarity two strangers might share watching a house burn down.
Bronzini envied the blithe arrivals of life's late people. How do they manage the courage to be late, enact the rude dare repeatedly in our waiting faces? […] Envy and admiration both. He took it that these people refuse to be mastered by the pettier claims of time and conscience.