There is nothing, Lois says, gayer than spelunking.

He wondered, "What if I never get out of the shower?" and just like that he never did.

Four opted for the coffee and three chose the water.

Being able to walk in a straight line is not something Yoda had ever taught himself to appreciate. The sidewalks on Coruscant, on Alderaan, even on Kashyyyk, they took the user where they wanted to go...

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They adopted a dog, a fuzzy white mutt, and named her Alice B. Toklas.

The crazy girls are the ones that won’t disappear.

Every day we both live.

There were no ways around. There was reverse, but that was its own failure.

She is thinking that when you make love, your brain opens, and everyone knows what you are thinking, and you know what everyone else is thinking, so your husband knows what you are thinking and can control you.

They had taken up four of the ten seats in the sushi restaurant, and the smallness of the room made them serious and giddy, as if they were being admitted to a secret.

Greg listened to hold music while rereading the suicide note.

I told him about Nebraska and how it was a dried up ancient ocean bed, how farmers harvested corn and clicks, how there might be kings buried under the freshly tilled soil or angels who dusted the August crops.

When the ground thaws and the air grows thin, the boys come crawling out of the valley to your doorstep at the foot of Mount Rose.

Had I broken a vase, it wouldn’t be as bad. Events like that are outside of reasonable control. Anybody can slip and trip over a vase.

 It was weird seeing him without a hair wrap, without roller blades, his uniform in college, weird seeing him instead in a pastel button-up.

We’d read in a tour book that the Moscow clubs had shoe and face policies, which meant your shoes had to be killer and your face had to be hot...

Coco with hairs between her eyes she had me pluck sometimes at sleepovers, and eyes that opened me up like I needed fixing.

Shaving his neck to impress...

She imagined walking barefoot across the grass in the backyard, sitting in the hammock and reading that book her teacher from graduate school had published.

The landscape was a flat dimension, no mountains or hills. Farmland and ramshackle homes that looked like collages, you could see the years in them.

She looks away but can’t get the photo out of her mind, like gazing at the sun, an electric blotch.

I saw her in front of us then, and she struck me: white parka down to mid-calf meeting white Ugg boots, white hood drawn over head.

Usually I’d just as soon look away from cruelty, but Lemuel flung that chicken square at my face and my first instinct was to swat her, fretting her clipped wings and shrieking like a raspy old woman, down on the heads of the others. Simple reflex.

But here, in the house at the edge of the ocean, there is no camera, and so Mrs. Brody awaits her lover.