Ravens bring things to people. We're like that. It's our nature. We don't like it.

It's whatever we can get, then," she said, "on whatever terms we can get it.

We are all ghosts," Morris Klapper said at last. "We are conceived in a moment of death and born out of ghost wombs, and we play in the streets with other little ghosts, chanting ghost-rhymes and...

The air was motionless, carved, a block of warm copper fitting neatly around the earth, molded while soft to fit every house and every human being on the earth, and now hardened forever so that no man...

There was nothing for it now but to throw himself on Campos's mercy, and it had been Mr. Rebeck's experience of mercy that it had a tendency to buckle under the weight of a human soul.

I've always thought cemeteries were like cities. There are streets, avenues-you've seen them, I think, Michael. There are blocks, too, and house numbers, slums and ghettos, middle-class sections and...

When I was eighteen or twenty, I knew everything except what I wanted. I knew all about people, and poetry, and love, and music, and politics, and baseball, and history, and I played pretty good jazz...

You think this is living? This is eating, nothing else.

So let's say you marry this girl. All right, you can still be a great man. Look at all the great men who had wives. Go ahead, be a great man, don't let me stop you. Only first you should stop by the...

So I had something to do, something I'd done, someplace to go, and something to look forward to. That's a reasonable way to live. I enjoyed myself living. I had a good time. How much else can you ask...

The dead, he had said once, need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead. At twenty-two, it had sounded precocious; at thirty-four, it sounded mature, and this pleased...

There are no happy endings, he knew, because nothing ends; and if there were any being dispensed, a great many worthier people would be in line for them long before Michael and Laura and himself. But...

I believe myself to be good, he thought, and so I can afford to titillate myself by considering evil, like a child frightening himself with horror stories. I am not a bad man. But I am not a wise one,...

Hell of an ornithologist you'd make.

It's like marriage. The race there is between total knowledge of each other and death. If death comes first, it's considered a successful marriage.

Man searches constantly for identity, he thought as he trotted along the gravel path. He has no real proof of this existence except for the reaction of other people to that fact. So he listens very...

I love you," Laura said hopelessly. "I'd love you if you were afraid of everything in the world.

They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.

...I was one of the haves, and one of the secrets of being a have is not wasting your time on empathy.

The stars were going out now, one by one, dropping like pennies behind the television aerials and the skylights and the washing strung between the chimneys. The sky was still dark - a sated, navy-blue...

Forget it, Jonathan, and go back to sleep. And before you go to sleep, pray that no well-meaning god ever makes you immortal.

I am afraid! It is not starving I fear, or talking to people, or even being alone. But I cannot bear to be useless and ineffectual. There must be some meaning to me, if not to my life; there must...

The baloney weighed the raven down, and the shopkeeper almost caught him as he whisked out the delicatessen door.

Sure, she loves him. But they've got two different ideas of love. He wants to dance with her on a terrace with a full moon and a thirty-six-piece orchestra; he wants to go singing through storms with...

Alarm clocks were going off in the city now. One after another, sometimes two or three together, they drove their small silver knives into the body of the great dream that sprawled naked on the...

You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his...

I am infected with life and will die of it in time.

The tune was wailing and mournful, almost flagrantly so, and the total effect was of a heartbroken piccolo being parted forever from its bagpipe lover.

Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.

I love you, more, I think, than I know, but our kind of love isn't a sword. It's a light. Not a fire. A small light, just bright enough to read love letters by and keep the animals at a growling...