Sublime

He can find no way to say what so badly needs saying. Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm.

McInerney’s big job now is acting as a custodian for the statue of himself that celebrity has

Of all the things I miss about Tony—his lilting speaking voice, his gentle hands—it’s this most of all: He made me laugh every single day. He could see absurdity, puncture pomposity, pull off practical jokes of maddening plausibility.

bathos

I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.

Up ahead, waiting to receive them stretched an avenue—almost a colonnade—of maples, their branches and lobed leaves interlocking overhead.

The table was loaded with yellowing newspapers and empty bottles and it held a single brown and wrinkled potato in which even the sprouting eyes were rotten. Red wine had been spilled on the floor, it had been allowed to dry and it made the air in the room sweet and heavy. But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact th

He was fond of saying that, since to be in prison was simply not to live, the death penalty was the only merciful verdict any jury could deliver. I remember thinking that, in effect, he had never left prison, prison was all that was real to him, he could speak of nothing else. All his movements, even to the lighting of a cigarette, were stealthy, w