All wisdom ends in paradox.

Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we'd been too infatuated to listen. Our surveillance had been so focused we missed nothing but a...

Dreams are for those who sleep, we have to live.

I want to ask them some questions: Is stupidity a quality? Is intelligence a curse?

Here we are basically a dreamer, a person without contact with reality. When he jumped, he would probably appear that he would fly

Lobsters are classified in the phylum Arthropoda, same as insects. They're bugs. And bugs are only lobsters that have learned to fly.

We were happy when Joe the Retard showed up. He arrived on his mother's arm, wearing his baggy Bermuda shorts and his blue baseball cap, and as usual he was grinning with the face he shared with every...

Still point of the turning world.

Who else did they have to turn to? Not their parents. Nor the neighborhood. Inside their house they were prisoners; outside, lepers. And so they hid from the world, waiting for someone-for us-to save...

In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased. Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness...

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about...

The world is a pure emotion, coming and coming between its creatures.

The Lisbon girls were thirteen {Cecelia}, and fourteen {Lux}, and fifteen {Bonnie}, and sixteen {Mary}, and seventeen {Therese}.

How long could we remain true to the girls? How long could we keep their memory pure? As it was, we didn't know them any longer, and their new habits-of opening a window, for instance, to throw out a...

The two of them, father and son, lived like roommates, stumbling upon each other in their matching peacock robes, bitching over who used up the coffee, but by afternoon they drifted in the pool...

He had been a teacher so long he had a sink in his room.

Dust balls lined the steps. A half-eaten sandwich sat atop the landing where someone had felt too sad to finish it.

But then she came closer and we saw the light in her eyes we have been looking for ever since.

Our only legacy would be the desertion.

Inerts except when removed, their wings beat fury between our fingers and then flew to cling to anything, inert again

The tragedy became diffuse and universalized.

Despite all the care and complaints about weeds, they did not give the lawns a damn.

But even as we make these conclusions we feel our throats plugging up, because they are both true and untrue. So much has been written about the girls in the newspapers, so much has been said over...

He observed it with such a concentration that he even ceased to exist

Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames.

plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set

For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on.

Once autumn began with a universal rumble high in the crowns of trees. Then the leaves were torn off and endured to the ground in infinite abundance, circling and spitting, worn by the currents, as if...

A bullet due to family pressure. A bullet due to genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical discomfort. A bullet for an inevitable impulse. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but this...

He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled panties, of stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of the girls, of a crucifix draped with a brassiere, of gauzy chambers of...