“Falling from favor, or grace, some high artifice, down he dropped like a discredited predicate through what he called space (sometimes he called it time) and with an earsplitting crack splattered the base earth with his vital attributes.”
"At eleven, the child was into fractals. Naturally then, the mother agreed to drive him to the Fractal Museum in Portland, Maine—'The Singular Museum of Its Kind.'”
“Mostly he ignores me. He might as well live here alone. He makes eye contact at times, but instantly looks away again. His large hazel eyes are strikingly human; they remind me of yours.”
“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who leave home, and those who don’t. I’m a proud member of the first category.”
“When Lev says 'things' he means our marriage, and when he says 'fail' he means a decision he has already made without me.”
“I had not been alive long before my mother, Bibi Khanoum, dropped dead.”
“Thank God we’d finished eating. Gooey boeuf Bourguignon, which was typical of Paige’s French cooking, served on good china with Baccarat stemware.”
“When Ripple arrives home, he finds his mother anxiously waiting for him on the roof in her feathered lingerie with two butlers, a maid, a first-aid kit, and his apehound Hooligan straining on a leash.”
“From the moment I saw Lucius Bocelli I wanted to go to bed with him.”
“The consultant stamps down the wheel lock of Karin’s hospital bed.”
“When the polar explorer turned six, she was shown the best way to hold a knife and how to make a slice across the lamb’s throat—just one, they don’t feel it, do it hard, watch your brother.”
“I became Rachel Gardner when I was 20, in 1968, a year from which no event sticks with me as much as the discovery that I was one-half goy.”
“When Andreev said two bodies had been discovered outside the Kharbin train station, the Baron had an image of the dead men sprawled against snow, frozen in positions their bodies couldn’t hold in life.”
“Hasib Mohamed Jaafar was 21 years old, dark, slim, and married to Dua Jabbar.”
“When I was a child, just before my father left us, he gave me a large doll. She had rather an ugly face and stiff hair you couldn’t brush, but I loved her.”
“In her second semester at an art academy in southern Germany, the daughter of a brewery owner (with properties in Bavaria, but also in the Czech Republic) met and fell in love with a Japanese man. ”
“For almost two years, I’ve lived at the edge of the bucolic, where the land begins to shift into something untamed, in a tiny neighborhood in the woodsy outskirts of a New England college town.”
“Just when she thought her torment was over, he reappeared.”
“He stared hard at Frank Harris, harder than he ever had, because this fact Harris needed to understand, even if it had to be driven in with hammer and nail.”
“Killing a pig is easy. Pigs are like fat babies. Hot-blooded, squirmy, squealing, sly, and utterly useless unless you like their meat.”
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