“Last night, after she had finished the red wine and then discovered where Leslie had hidden the bottle of whisky, she clumsily knocked over an empty glass and watched as it spiraled to the floor and smashed.”
“Evening swept through the Delta: half an hour of mauve before the sky bruised to black. It was Chike Ameobi’s twelfth month as an officer in Bayelsa, twelve months on the barren army base.”
“After the incident with the power washer, I was determined to get my life together.”
“My girl’s cousin came over. ‘Hey, y’all! Ch’all dewn?’ she said, striding in and setting down her massive key chain.”
“The Jessup house in Anadarko, Oklahoma, was the last location on our shooting schedule.”
“The old man ran. He quickly lost his hat, his staff. He ran. Ran without haste.”
"Dark in the dark, you come as stones striking glass. The girl you want to wake is awake. I am afraid for you.”
“She tried to avert her gaze from any man. She didn’t consider herself beautiful, but she had something some men sometimes liked. Some thing. Some times. Some men. Like she was in on the big joke.”
“It’s Sunday evening and there’s nothing to eat. Elena’s bladeless fan pivots in monochrome silence, the centerpiece of a room that’s untidy in an engineered way, like movie teenage bedrooms.”
“A raindrop appeared in Bern’s right eye the night before his trip. A mote, a foreign object?”
“Frankie’s dad told him that sometimes firemen need to burn down a bad house on purpose in order to save a good neighborhood.”
“During the thirties Jessica Yarrow had found a publisher for no fewer than four volumes of verses, and the pleasant little parties in her studio had led to her being regarded with affection by many of the more subdued Bohemians; but now, it being 1941, she had been in the Women’s Land Army for nearly a year, and seemed to have only a single friend in the world, her resigned fellow-sufferer, Bunty Baines, daughter of a veterinary surgeon in Shropshire, and one to whom animals and the land seemed truly the order of nature.”
“At every instant to have lost, to have to refind one’s vocabulary, to have to start over from the most common vocabulary, crude, down to earth, from the lack of vocabulary, nearly absolute, of farmers, of workers, of their badges, muddy, earthen blunder: look at what is good!”
“It was April 1990, not even four months into the new decade, and already Nelson Mandela had been freed and Daniel Ortega defeated and the first McDonald’s opened in the USSR, which was about to drift apart, ending the Cold War, and still, although increasingly people chose to ignore this, everything was awful when it came down to inequality and Earth destruction and generally being fucked by capitalism.”
“In a land without bananas, the village awoke to nine banana crates, each containing the severed head of one of its sons.”
“When our marriage ended, I told Seth it was because we had too many White People conversations.”
“Across the street is a KFC. I see a lot of young people with motorbike helmets tucked under their arms go in there, pushing the glass doors inward and letting out a blast of air-conditioned air.”
“I had to go to Belgrade to give a couple of lectures, and Charles was unable to travel with me. I am a literary figure, but might have preferred to be an architect. I have a strong sense of space, I am touching my heart at this very moment.”
“Brett was crashing with me while he was on the lam after sucker-punching a Republican. You probably think harboring a fugitive is exciting, but it’s not half as thrilling as it sounds.”
“When Lane comes out of the gas station store, the dog is waiting for him. It sits in the dusty crossroads, alert and eager, ears pricked and black tongue stiff between its panting jaws.”
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