Status Updates From The Gold Bug Variations

Even the complete library, unattainable, will never begin to hint at the books, the stories the string might have produced.

He'd like us to tell him a story. He says that if we give him one, he'll be good.

100 pages to go!

She is more beautiful in distress than at her sunniest. He needs this woman, her scattered stimuli of joy, intensity, and fright.

You Find Yourself Here.

Science remains at best a marvelous mine, not a replacement for the shattered Tower...the human genome defies interpretation.

I would tell him everything I have found...I would make metaphors for you until I became almost clear. Words are fairy tale, not a court transcript.

We aren't really one another's type, you know. You need someone neurotic, taller, silkier, not so verbose.

"Love," she says..."Whatever you think about me when you are old, I want you to remember that I never lied to you."

They walk by the roadside, in silence except for the creak of wheel rims and the clop of hooves. Jeannie...curtsies to a passing buggy and the driver acknowledges with a reserved nod. That one gesture gives Ressler the acute pleasure of locating the key to the chance variations of existence.

Weed it and reap!

...because I loved with all the force of metaphor; because I loved those two as if they were the last similes on earth; because I will never get the exact words and will be lucky to hint at the weakest equivocation...

A systematic disorder in the dress kindles in me a wantonness.

Yet life in theory (more beautiful because more crystal-cold) didn't do him [Todd] in; life as lived did, the twist existence laid at his door.

The point of science was to lose ourselves in the world's desire.

For a brief moment, [Ressler] achieved a synthesis between [the] scientist's certainty in underlying particulars and the cleric's awe at the unmappable whole.

If this is the end, at least I'm surrounded by books.

Each excess program copy is shaped by limit...Pruning makes the garden proliferate.

I'm not alienated. I'm a United States citizen.

Well, that chapter was like the twin helix of eroticism!

Why heck you stop?

A prolific writer, the man [his new boss] is to trees what Bill Cody was to buffalo.

Here it comes. There. What a chord! Hear?

There are big books one turns to excitedly every day, glad that there are hundreds of pages left to go, and there are those that one picks up with a sigh. This is the latter. Still going to finish it though.

growing on me a little