“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.”
“Throughout our twenties, nobody in our friendship group had been willing to admit they wanted to procreate. It was a shameful, secret pursuit, like skiing.”
“Ziggy is fucking frozen all the way through by the time they finally find the party, by the time she and Emily get the nerve to open the door to the old rundown house that thumps with bass and rattles with people.”
“Frances was fucking her heart out on top of me. Cursing, wild-eyed. This was the picture I had in mind whenever anyone would ask me why we were still together. This is why we’re still together.”
“In his school bag is a book of raffle tickets for the sports club. When he’s finished his dinner he’ll go around the houses he can see in the photo to sell some tickets.”
“June of that year was a month of martyrs and bloody days. In answer to the cries of 'Down with the shah!' and 'Down with imperialism!' the holy city of Qom had been set ablaze.”
“Every time Michael told Gina about how he had become her father’s debtor—the old man’s slave, he always said—the story changed a bit.”
“After martial arts and gymnastics, we have nature hiking with the botanist. The botanist is usually a graduate student from Santa Cruz or Davis, who reiterates, with each brittle leaf, desiccated seedpod, and severed insect leg or wing, that she isn’t a certified expert.”
“Mrs. Bobs did not know the first thing about me, for instance that I was a chalk-and-talker, recently suspended for hanging a troublesome student out of a classroom window.”
“A quarter only got you ten minutes here, but I supposed we’d been lucky to find a parking spot at all. Lower Manhattan, late September. The air studiously neutral, at last emptied of the humid frenetic energy that had made of the city a kind of particulate snow globe in the last few weeks.”
“A certain woman never felt entirely comfortable speaking her native tongue. She spoke ably enough; her vocabulary and grammar were adequate to say all she needed to say, but she didn’t feel at home either in her mind or in her mouth.”
“The night before we load you into the crate and watch as the helicopter carries you off to the undisclosed location to drop you into the Atlantic Ocean, we eat dinner as a family.”
“Findlay and Alan were brothers and they lived with their parents, who were teachers, in Kenilworth Drive, just up from the old Kenilworth Hotel. They were eccentric kids. At the age of fourteen Findlay subscribed to Newsweek and Alan was a practising magician who, he claimed, had been initiated into a coven of witches that practised out of Katherine Park at night.”
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