Her hair was wiglike in overall configuration, but it had a high protein luster no real wig could ever duplicate.

(with college-age children and a wife who always appeared about to ululate)

and which has also historically dominated this entire region of the rain forest and exacted tribute from all the other villages, this both because their warriors are so fierce and because their autocratic shaman is extremely ancient and politically astute and merciless and frightening and is universally regarded as being at the very least in league

was the type of nightmare whose terror is less about what you see than about the feeling you have in your lower chest about what you’re seeing.

In some respects, Atwater’s various tics and habitual gestures were designed to physicalize his consciousness and to keep him from morbid abstractions like this—he wasn’t going to have a stroke, he wouldn’t have to look at the painting or listen to the idiot tune over and over until a maid came in the next morning and found him.

and that somewhere along the line his professional marketing skills had metastasized throughout his whole character so that he was now the sort of man who, if he were to screw up his courage and ask a female colleague out for drinks and over drinks open his heart up to her and reveal that he respected her enormously, that his feelings for her invol

I myself simply could not believe that Hope and myself’s relationship at this crucial, ‘Empty nest’ point in our marriage could founder on such a trivial issue, one which, even in far less happy or viable unions than our own, must, for the most part, be resolved or ‘worked through’ rather early on. Like conflicts concerning, for instance, partners’

Though technically fat, she presented more as simply huge, extrudent in all three dimensions.

It was not a soporific conceit. It was also, obviously, private.