If I wrote a war novel my wife would be killed off before our relationship figured out our differences. Like her being really Asian and me being just so-so Asian.

And right there beside me That single wobbling Snail-like trail of my heavy French Horn case

We walk in silence. We water our plants. We don’t eat as well as we should. We try to love. We try to forget.

This is what it is to feel yourself forget.

Used to be I'd keep busy. Dreadful the time I spend sitting, standing, staring. I lose track, now. I believe it's because he died. It gets hold of me. I'll see him half on half off his bed, a plaid blanket angled over his back and legs, held…

"[A]ppointed an official supplier of watches for the Ministry of Defence of the Soviet Union in 1965."

She pulled the book off its shelf. It meant something else now. He'd quote her in the mirror, at the backs of buses that kept her moving, something she'd said without saying. He would remember for them. She'd forget, without him, the way she wanted. Garland and lights were…

When God blessed creation, a ewe gave birth to Adam. When he cursed Satan, Eve hatched from a crocodile's egg.——In naming the animals, Adam marked them for death. His own name was a slow fire. Eve's was an inferno.——In the shelter of the Tree of…

Space, blank, uninterrupted, but then a fissure, a crack, a corridor, and down it you're walking.

In and out of morphine dreams, he flies through the unfinished roof of Illinois sky. Below, matchbox-sized farm machines. A silo becomes his father's thermos, the silver-capped tower from which he stole sips at ten, his first secret. Back …

...a headwater stream that has never had a name....

A lowing cow cracked open the darkened room like the yawn of a gravid alien.

I'm not sure if he's right or not but he has a gorgeous smile, he's charmingly self confident, and he's very persuasive.

The Judge waited for the perfect wave.

Homer relaxes in his tan, faded recliner, remote in hand, and watches death unfold on his television.