“The dark and the snow are too thick for him to see beyond the first trees. He’s been in there before at this time, when the dark shuts down in early winter. But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up […]
“One night somebody asked, when is the best time in a man’s life? Some said, it’s when you are a kid and can fool around all the time and go down to the river in the summer and play hockey on the road in the winter and that’s all you think about, fooling around and […]
“It’s what happen at home that you try to protect, as best you can, for as long as you can.” ––Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014, by Alice Munro, pg. 303 “We childless ones, whether through bravery or cowardice, constitute a kind of existential vanguard, forced by our own choices to face the naked question […]
“The bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. To accept what had happened and be clear about what would happen. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or […]
“It seemed only proper that the antics of her former self should not be connected with her present self––let alone with the real self that she expected would take over once she got out of this town and away from all the people who thought they knew her. It was the whole twist of consequence […]
“What is it about an infant’s crying that makes it so powerful, able to break down the order you depend on, inside and outside of yourself? It is like a storm––insistent, theatrical, yet in a way pure and uncontrived. It is reproachful rather than supplicating––it comes out of a rage that can’t be dealt with, […]
“I argued that you don’t know if your actions are futile; that you don’t have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you […]
Three years ago, my father pointed me toward a frightfully thick book called Cryptonomicon that permanently rearranged my relationship with modern fiction. Since that first taste, Neal Stephenson has challenged me in every way an author can (including nearly boring me to death). Stephenson looms larger in my literary pantheon––and weighs more heavily on my […]
“The White Sky took form and fury. The cloud bloomed and evoluted like cream in coffee, spreading and paling, though from place to place one could see fresh bursts as rocks hurled out in earlier collisions found distant targets and touched off smaller chain reactions of their own. In places it took on a cellular […]
“This was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted, ultimately, in a system of rootlets.” ––Seveneves, […]