“Before falling asleep, concentrated and magical, she would say farewell to things in a last instant of lightly illuminated consciousness. She knew that in the half-light 'her things' were better living their own essence.”
“The whole great office had been organized for the war, and functioned at a slacker pace nowadays; but the staff of the department was still complete. The men who worked there were the best in the country at the particular work concerned. They were known jokingly within the Ministry as the 'twenty-four geniuses.' ”
“As an illustration of what I was up against at Napa State Hospital, what they used to call an asylum for the criminally insane, my fellow inmate Arn Boothby, an angry three-hundred-pound paranoid schizophrenic who regularly “cheeked” his meds, tried to kill another inmate one day in the client convenience store by grabbing his throat and throwing him through a glass display case.”
“Captain Renzi's gaze was lifeless: instead of establishing a dialogue with his interlocutor, he'd been tasked to ensure it wouldn't happen. Even his way of talking put people off: he meticulously avoided any kind of intimacy, which made any dialogue with him as abstract as a carpet's geometric patterns.”
“My brother Abram Ball died in 1998. He was twenty-four years old and had Down syndrome.”
“If I concentrate, I can see where the river should be. It almost doesn’t exist, like the blue of skim milk.”
“Elizabeth Bishop, a person I admire, once lived in Brazil. She wrote a book about the country for the Life World Library. She fought with the publisher over points of style, and complained theatrically about it in letters to Robert Lowell.”
“Mikey Callahan discovered something about himself when he was six years old. Students from his first-grade class were taken one at a time from the classroom and ushered to the gymnasium for standard medical tests.”
“In the windy city they sway on a bridge and let the wind get under their dresses, Claire and Julia, happy. Let them be happy. They have suffered.”
“My mother loved limits. They were a ten-foot fence guarding her and her family. Nothing could get in, nothing could get out.”
“When he was two years old the boy was dropped off at the donation door at the Salvation Army secondhand store in Tunica wearing nothing but a sagging diaper.”
“Things, as we know, disappear—often under strange circumstances—and they don’t come back.”
“Long ago, in a former age and a bygone time, there was a king who wished to test the loyalty of his people. He issued a command that for one night no light must show in any part of the city.”
“The house by the river belonged to an old man whose relationship to George Meshaw was complicated but easily covered by 'cousin.' He had lived there alone, with a painting that was probably a Bonnard.”
“What follows is a story of contagion, and it begins, as all such stories must, with a message both obscure and appalling.”
“The little girl’s laughter jars on my ears. I turn to look at her. She dashes through the airport lounge, brandishing her doll with a buoyancy unsuited to the time of day.”
“My father had his own way of going to the mountains: scarcely inclined to meditation, full of obstinacy and arrogance.”
“In different periods, artists “imitated life” differently, because, duh, life was different.”
“A clap of thunder seems to rip open a hole in the sky. I watch rain pelt down in hard sheets from the upstairs balcony and worry about my younger daughter, who is stranded at school.”
“Sara got out of the pool the same way she always got out of the pool: attempting to quell the greasy feeling, the revulsion that her own wet body produced.”
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