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The fact that these parking-lots, freeways, drive-ins and other facilities have not wrecked the city-form is due chiefly to the fact that Los Angeles has no urban form at all in the commonly accepted sense.

... ridiculous names, of which Australia has a respectable plenitude. I am thus able to report that the following are all real places: Wee Waa, Poowons, Borrumbuttock, Suggan Buggan, Boomahnoomoonah, Waaia, Mullumbimby, Ewylamartup, Jiggalog, and the supremely satisfying Tittybong.

We may say what we please, but those we can be the easiest and freest with, are ever those we like, not to say love the best.

One day, I will be able to tell my mother, I thought. When she finally understands what I've been doing, perhaps she will forgive me for all the secrets and lies over so many years.

Well then, dressed I was, and little did it then enter into my head that all this gay attire was no more than decking the victim out for sacrifice, whilst I innocently attributed all to mere friendship and kindness in the sweet good Mrs. Brown; who, I was forgetting to mention, had, under pretence of keeping my money safe, got from me, without the least hesitation, the driblet (so I now call it) which remained to me

The next day, I stashed my belongings in a suitcase and boarded the train for Berlin. As we made our way I realized I was on a trip to nowhere, without a return ticket. The destination on the map of my life was clearly marked with a hammer, a sickle, and a big question mark.

She wondered how Martha felt when Ryder smiled, and how much of the smile was calculated. Not that it mattered. Everyone had his own shell game, and if Ryder Channing had known tonight how to make her feel open and happy for an hour or so, they had, in the end, conned each other.

The long evening shadows were beginning to chequer the bright lawn, the still river, "one burnished sheet of living gold" reflected with unbroken clearness the picturesque barges that floated lazily by and the bright pleasure boats that stayed their rapid oars at the sound of the music from the garden. The summer air, rich with the perfume of the magnolias, breathed softly over all this beauty.

'We never should have gone against him! One must always howl with the wolf, never against the wolf!' Schaeffer uttered, poking the few remaining coals among the ashes stuck on the rock.

And Subiabre, tightly embracing his dog's body as if he were hugging his life, sat down on a pile of snow, hard and cold like the hearts of the owners of that land.

he Muslims put water in their coffee while Serbs put coffee in their water; but Bosnian Serbs did it both ways, and besides, how could you even talk about it without laughing?

A word in Serbian for a really bad character is a bitanga. That's a conflation of bitte-danke. During the Crusades, the Germans were returning from the Holy Land through Croatia, and the Croats would come to their camps, begging, "Bitte, danke. Bitte,danke."

His real name was Pasteur Semmelweiss Murphy; so naturally he called himself Dr Peter S Murphy: rather, his patients and colleagues knew him by that name. In his own mind he called himself names as hideous and hopeless as the agony of which they were born.

I felt relief to be back in India, after the claustrophobia of an Islamic society. I liked seeing women again on the streets. The dirt and filth of India didn't seem to matter. The people of Pakistan were relaxed enough about their religion. It was just the wretched laws, hanging like a cloud over one: the call to prayers... The thought police. Islam on wheels.

Perhaps [cities] died like this: when everybody was suffering; when transport was so hard that working people gave up jobs they needed because they feared the suffering of the travel; when no one had clean water or air; and no one could go walking. Perhaps cities died when they lost the amenities that cities provided, the visual excitement, the heightened sense of human possibility....

The land was sacred, but it wasn't political history that made it so. Religious myths touched every part of the land outside colonial Goa. Story within story, fable within fable: that was what people saw and felt in their bones. Those were the myths, about gods and the heroes of the epics, that gave antiquity and wonder to the earth people lived on.

My vision of Bombay began to change: the 'poor', the people down there, were acquiring individuality and had begun to stake their own claim to the city; piety (or rage at their condition, or disgust) was no longer a sufficient response.

Starting in the late 1960s, the word within federal law enforcement circles was that agents working out of the FBI's Las Vegas office were "freeloading" all over town. They were reportedly receiving free meals and drinks from the very individuals and casinos they were supposed to be investigating or keeping an eye on.

He took his beer out to the back deck so he could look out at the city. The air was cold and crisp. It made the lights in the canyon and down on the freeway sharper and crisper. Cold nights always made Bosch feel lonely. The chill worked its way into his backbone and held there, made him think about things he had lost over time.

Putting a nineteen-year-old gangbanger in a room and getting him to give up the next guy in the line was about as easy as opening a can of peas with your fingers.

In the unstable compound of fable and fact that must pass as his life, the "real" [Alfred] Jarry is as much of a pretense as a personality. Because of the violent fusion he attempted of life and literature, we shall find him equally present in his writings. A biography of Jarry ends by being about someone else, the inside-out person he created. In an almost frightening seizure, he became his pose.

The only barrier to rampant adultery was the whalebone corset; many an errant wife, when she returned to face her waiting coachman, had to hide under her coat the bundle of undergarments which her lover had not been dexterous enough to lace back around her torso.

I have to report that I coached them assiduously in the art of identifying themselves to other English-speaking [travelers]. If any such person should ask Sidi Mahmoud who he is, the reply will be: "I am a lawng streak of piss." Mohamed, for his part, will oblige with "I am a cunning little shit."

The man stops by the public pool on his way home from work. It's something he does from time to time. He enjoys the laughter, the splashing, the sound of feet slapping concrete. He stands by the fence, taking it all in.
That's when he sees the shark.

There were very few girls at Bird's university, and all of those had undergone a transmutation into peculiar monsters shortly after they had graduated. A certain percentage of their body cells slowly overdeveloped, clustered and knotted until the girls were moving sluggishly and looking dull and melancholic. In the end, they became fatally unfit for everyday, postgraduate life.

This collection had been formed for a purpose like the present, by Carathis herself, from a presentiment, that she might one day, enjoy some intercourse with the infernal powers: to whom she had ever been passionately attached, and to whose taste she was no stranger.

People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars. But in themselves, they are uninterested.

The reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply was that I had poured my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die.