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When I wasn’t teaching social studies, I basically lived on my balcony.

It was half the Spanish he knew—stop, I have a shotgun.

People talk this way who would prefer the earth parceled out in standard lots.

It was a Hmong villager who roped you with dogs on the chase.

I grip the handlebar and pin my eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable crash.

I want to dispute that depression is by definition pathological.

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

It begins on the sunny morning of November 14, 1960.

“I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

“I suppose there have been a good many men killed in this room.”

He held a screwdriver to the fleshy underside of Peggy’s neck.

“Ki-Tae the famous pastor,” Jae says to her. “Can you believe life.”

The underworld reached out for your hand and found payment.

You don’t feel anything when they cut you, not at first, just the blood.

“I can’t hold it any longer. I have to pee,” I finally confessed to Viola.

He thinks with joy and conviction that the Japanese are his enemy.

I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention.

If I also could be lifted into the sky, I’d wish to be blown apart.

The sense of power that flights of temper evoke will betray you.

It was on a mid-June morning that the stranger first called.

Any society that fails to protect its children is in terminal decline.

He always talked of making money with the air of a connoisseur.

Kitty reached the age of twenty-five and was still unmarried.

I managed to talk sensible Alice into a little pink outfit and high heels.

I had to prepare. I had to be able to save us from what was coming.

He was last in Calcutta more than fifteen years ago, for his mother’s funeral. Han Ru feels something vaguely discomfiting, followed by a surge of recognition.

When he kisses me, my heart flutters in my chest like swarming bees.

Her bra is black, her breasts full and white. There is too much flesh.