Mercury Pictures Presents

The better you know someone the less understandable they become. That's what intimacy is - not a threshold of knowledge but a capitulation to ignorance, an acceptance that another person is made as bewildered and ungovernable by her life as you are by yours.

The Polish postal system is so consistently unreliable it must mis-deliver mail to the right address now and then.

First-class berths are always available on sinking ships.

Our children could never survive the world we've come from, and we could never survive the world they're going into.

There was nothing he wasn't willing to fail at. Besides denying his racism, it was his most American quality.

Perhaps racism demonstrates its tenacity by making hypocrites of even its victims.

Artie had named the canary Charles Lindbergh, on account of it being an excellent aviator but otherwise a real piece of work.

No one truly touched by reality believes it worth honoring. What monster or dullard provisioned with Hollywood’s godly powers would reproduce life as it was, without revision or redemption?

The problem with Christianity of course, is the Christians.

Talk about a fella who needs psychoanalysis. Poor guy thinks his dad's God and his mom's a virgin. No wonder he has a messiah complex. Still, I must admit, I like Jesus's politics. Feeding the hungry, blessing the meek, wearing a robe to work.

Inside,” Concetta says. A virtuoso of the imperative mood, she easily converts any preposition to command. She lays the bouquet of dead chicken across her forearm, its white feathers disheveled from the final futile wingbeat.

His medicines were entirely side effects. His skin cream gave you vertigo, his weight-loss formula induced hair loss, his cure-all cured nothing, and his anti-aging tonic was an alarmingly fast-acting laxative.

I can’t show a husband and wife faithfully married for fifty years sleeping in the same bed without that two-bit Torquemada Joe Breen farting brimstone on me. And yet the pope’s private chapel has more southern exposure than a ballpark bathroom at the bottom of the seventh.

Your father is the worst thing that's ever happened to me," her mother said. "He also happens to be the love of my life.

Being broken delicately is what I call being whole.

Helming Mercury’s accounts was like being chief meteorologist on a Mesopotamian plain oft hit with brimstone and deluge. Properly performing the job meant inciting panic, lamentation, and notions of divine betrayal.

Long before she went to work in the pictures, she understood that the true temptation of fantasy wasn’t its outlandishness but its aching plausibility.

What gave conspiracy the credibility reasonable explanation lacked? What hunger for order, even diabolical order, did it satisfy?

The problem with Christianity, of course, is the Christians. It's like communism. A belief system based on human dignity that somehow incites its adherents to mass murder.

He fires up a cigar and considers the coming hours with an actuary’s eye for peril and profit.

Every parent is a failed dictator; it was nearly enough to inspire admiration for the real ones.

the rules of an old folks home: if you weren’t seen, you were presumed dead.

Life offered few pleasures as affordable as a well-made bed.

You poor girl,” Lala told Maria with genuine pity. “You have your whole life ahead of you.

Avoidance might not be the ideal solution, but it was more constructive than confession. Cleansing the mind by revealing its most putrid parts felt as excruciating and ineffective as purifying the soul with a flagellant's whip.

It wasn't Vedette's easy slide into prejudice that unsettled Maria so much as the suspension of disbelief it suggested, as if reality took the crooked shape of the mind into which it was poured. What gave conspiracy the credibility reasonable explanation lacked? What hunger for order, even diabolical order, did it satisfy?

Should she call Maria? Wasn't that what a good mother would do? It had been months since they last spoke.They weren't estranged so much as exhausted by the effort it took to steer conversation past all that they couldn't manage to say. It was safer to stay on separate shores than to navigate an ocean cluttered with icebergs.

The most meaningful experiences in her life were the most banal—the thrill of unexpected love, the pain of goodbye, the fear of insignificance.

Intimacy is not a threshold of knowledge but a capitulation to ignorance, an acceptance that another person is made as bewildered and ungovernable by her life as you are by yours.