I will go to work in the morning and no one will stop me. I wish someone would stop me. I don’t know if my car will start in this cold. But if it does (it always does), I am going to drive to work.

On that balcony, on every other day, she practised her other, more worldly religion - gardening, specifically sunflowers.

You might want to think twice before inviting Henry David Thoreau to your next dinner party...

whose spit is this?

No one had told the newer tenants that the dead would be given votes, and they were in an uproar: it wasn’t legal; it wasn’t fair; it was creepy.

Byron's achievement, certainly quite remarkable, is to have raised the drunken monologue to a literary form. Edmund Wilson

"She saw they were absorbed in making faces at each other with a smartphone app that enlarged a mouth."

1. Weeds of the World (Unite!) We invade the invaders and they invade us, these little Blooming weeds. They raise five flowers and let them blow Into the winds like sheets of stars. All of us Steer by their turning tide. All of us will eventually …

She is too stylish to be crazy, is what the migrant probably thinks. And he's right.

Not only half-full/ but stress-fractured

True facts about Redbeard the communist pirate.

I don’t know what to do with all this money flowing from my books. It’s burning a hole in my literary pocket.

I contemplate the words that did not make it; the lost ones. The words deprived of their moment in the sun. These words. These words that are not part of the story.

There was all this pomp and circumstance. We were each outfitted with robes, red of course, and mortar-boards with a gold tassel dangling over one eye. It made me positively dizzy. Plus I was extremely hung-over that day.

The tech turns off the music. The capsule blares. I am in Jurassic Park with Sam Neill. I am Timmy, descending the electrified fence, almost toast. I am Karen Silkwood, a deer in the headlights, then showering off plutonium. A garbage truck is compacting