For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

Evolution can't be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it's a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn't aim.

The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist.

I suppose the pursuit of fashion has always carried a price, monetary or otherwise.

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.