Quotes from Lydia Millet

She never understood why painters made ugly things. A, who wanted them in their house? This guy, obviously . . . who had no taste, or anyway was stuck in the nineties. And 2, it seemed like showing off. Like, hey, this is ugly! In your face. People were rude and called it art.

We all have our skill sets, right?

Hadn't they confiscated our cell phones, our tablets, all of our screens and digital access to the outside? We were being held in an analog prison, said David.

You know, a survival home for chaos time? Ours is in Washington," said another yacht kid. He had a flouncy bandanna tied around his neck. A really bad idea. Fashion-wise, he seemed to be their equivalent of Low. "State, not district. Obviously," he added. "Ours is in Oregon," said James. "Huge solar array. Looks like fucking Ivanpah. Eleven backup generators.

His platform includes a prolife agenda, for instance, which "values the sanctity of every human soul," and also "believes in the greatness of the American family." The word family, on his glossy-but-down-home webpage in its hues of red, white and blue, is a code for you, where you also means right, deserving, genuine and better than those others, you know, the ones who aren't you.

She gazed right through it to the future, another time and place without this jangling cascade of arbitrary noise.

That was what had changed, he thought. To love posterity and the great institutions you had to believe in the wisdom of men. You had to love them as a child might, gazing upward.

It made me think of how thin the border was between attractive and not, and yet, if it was there, you didn't want to cross it.

I had hoped that going to Hiroshima would reveal something small, gritty, and precise to countervail the epic quality of historical accounts.

In December 2011, a wild gray wolf set foot in California, the first sighting in almost a century. He'd wandered in from Oregon, looking for a mate.

Pugs are creatures of habit.

I've always wondered: is there really any access to the White House?