I have taken advantage of other people's weaknesses in order to cover my own.
I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.
This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.
We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.
To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one's fellow man even a fellow man striving to do the same to you creates what might be called an unassimilable memory: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was.
Goddamn you," Jacob said. "There's no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.
Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.
The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.
Heaven is the very last place to come to rest and don't you be afraid to bet on that!
I've always been one of those people who romanticized cooking, but the few attempts I'd made in my life resulted in friends' contorted faces as they desperately tried to say something nice about the "dish" they were eating.
Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.