I know what the right [man], at the right moment, can do to a [woman]. Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long.

_"Yeah," I said. "A place of our own ( Read more... )

That was when the evening fell into place and stopped smelling of danger; that was the moment when that riptide started rising inside me, like a shiver deep in my bones. From that second on, all I could do was go with its pull and believe it would lead us right, draw our feet through the tricky currents and over the wicked drops to all the safe

When someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.

For a long time I wanted [it], in the hot, vicious way you want something when you've been told you're not good enough.

You create illusions for long enough, you start thinking you're in control. It's easy to slide into believing you're the hypnotist here, the mirage master, the smart cookie who knows what's real and how all the tricks are done. The fact is you're still just another slack-jawed mark in the audience. No matter how good you are, this world is always ( Read more... )

My father once told me that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for. If you don't know that, he said, what are you worth? Nothing. You're not a man at all. I was thirteen and he was three quarters of the way into a bottle of Gordon's finest, but hey, good talk.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair ( Read more... )

Nothing endures but change ( Read more... )

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing ( Read more... )