Some Trick

by Helen DeWitt

‘I have nothing to give you but that’s all right because Knowledge of lack is possession Recognised absence is presence Perceived emptiness plenitude. To have not And know it Is to have.’

If what I have is what I said I wanted It’s not what I wanted I know what I want But I don’t know its name.

The point is simply, said Peter, that the family is a barbarous institution. One is, for the most part, stuck with the luck of a single draw.

As a child Peter had not been unduly, he wouldn’t have said, troubled by the shortcomings of his parents per se. The thing that had bothered him was the fact that all other adults colluded in placing him in the largely unchecked power of these individuals. All adults, even the apparently decent ones, were in collusion with evil.

The business of adapting a robot to American manners is, of course, an engineering feat of considerable ambition.

when a human being attempts not only to think but to speak with precision, he or she is often made to feel that this is a mark of social inadequacy and that there is something comical about it. The younger the human being, the more humorous it becomes. So that humans whose inclination it is to think and speak in this way become self-conscious from an early age, and a kind of minstrelisation creeps in.

If you have been insane there are so many things you can’t do.

There is a German word, getigert, for a cat with striped

To say that it wasn’t even that he liked crocodiles would be to miss the point, there was no way he would wear any shirt with a crocodile motif even if he did like crocodiles, or any shirt with any motif, unless it was an emblem you had to pay $100 to have on a shirt.

X likes songs that gesture at inarticulacy. He is drawn to the poignancy of a world in which the unspoken is two-thirds of the iceberg.

This was a question which admitted of only one reply, which she promptly gave, as plausibly as a person could who had heard the story twice before.