I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.