Hope: A Tragedy

We think of the obvious signs of love—tenderness, concern, care—and yet somehow, nothing said more about the health of a couple’s relationship than whether or not they went to bed at the same time.

It seemed such an inadequate device, the heart—so finicky, so easily stopped, so Japanese when it should be so German. One moment it’s pumping, the next it’s not. And they lived. The end.

Tall people appeared to have it easy; that was what Kugel found so galling. Like things just went their way. Let’s go buy a house! Let’s get expensive diving watches! Why not, we’re tall!

Maybe Godot shows up in act three, my son; maybe the audience is just leaving too early. ESTRAGON: Where’d they all go? VLADIMIR: They were just here.

Jonah had always been a sickly child; he was spiritually gorgeous and physically a mess. Kind and generous and giving, and sneezing and coughing and diarrheic.

the philosophy of science, the science of literature, the art of philosophy, the science of art, books about other books and the books about those books about other books; Gogol on Pushkin, Nabokov on Gogol, Wilson on Nabokov on Gogol. Joyce on The Odyssey, Beckett on Joyce, everyone on Beckett.

he still couldn’t bring himself to throw them away, like old medicine bottles full of remedies that never worked but that you didn’t dare throw away on the off chance they would someday do what they promised, that you’d be stricken by chance with the one disease only they could cure, two weeks after they’d been pulled off the market.

Has a gun owner ever, in the history of the weapon, been satisfied with a small gun? If a small gun can save me, he figures, what can a big gun save? What can the biggest gun save? What can a bomb save?

a furry, flattened body with a red/gray ejaculation of blood and brains having burst from his little exploded head. To Kugel, chipmunks looked as if they’d died of a good idea;