He looked ninety years old for thirty years and then he got the notion that he would die, and did so.

He died on his return to New York. He died on the gangplank, just a few feet away from America. He didn't quite make it. His hat did though. It rolled off his head and down the gang-plank and landed,...

people need a little loving and, God, sometimes it's sad all the shit they have to go through to find some.

- I want you to steal a corpse from the morgue....

Before I went out, I checked that I had not forgotten something. Of course I wasn't. So few things I possessed in this world that what the hell, I forget?

Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like...

Voluntary QuicksandI read the Chronicle this morningas if I were stepping into voluntaryquicksandand watched the news go over my shoeswith forty-four more days of spring.Kent StateAmericaMay 7, 1970

I looked at the menu even though I wasn't hungry. It had been years since I looked at a menu. The menu told me good morning, and I responded to him saying good morning. We can spend our lives talking...

Then they decided that the fleas that lived on Siamese cats would probably be more intelligent than the fleas that lived on just ordinary alley cats. It only made sense that drinking intelligent blood...

One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock.

It's all right, she said. It's all right. That was really a very nice sound. There should be a bird that does that: that sings when you are impotent.

I think my mind is going. It is changing into a cranial junkyard. I have a huge pile of rusty tin cans the size of Mount Everest and about a million old cars that are going nowhere but between my...

The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.

Vida was sound asleep when I went back to my room. I turned on the light and it woke her up. She was blinking and her face had that soft marble quality to it that beautiful women have when they are...

He looked as if he'd got a lot of pleasure out of going ten rounds with your grandmother and making sure she went the whole distance.

The girl was very pretty and her body was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over rocks of bone and hidden nerves.

I guess some people lived like Reader's Digest, but I hadn't met any and at that time it seemed doubtful that I ever would

The words came out of his mouth terribly dry. It was as if you were talking to you the Sahara Desert ... "I was mistaken," he was.