“You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn't much time left over for emotion recollect...”

“You have always wanted to be a writer. Getting the job at the magazine was only your first step toward literacy celebrity. You used to write what you believed to be urbane sketches infinitely super...”

“For a few weeks you got up at six to compose short stories at the kitchen table with while Amanda slept in the other room. Then your night life started getting more interesting and complicated, and...”

“This is shaping up even worse than you anticipated. Still, you feel a measure of detachment, as if you had suffered everything already and this were just a flashback. You wish that you had paid mor...”

“The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the ...”

“Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. Th...”

“The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the fla...”

“Disillusioned, people simply carried out their work as intended, drinking away sobriety at the end of each hard shift and repeating the process until death.”

“My mind feels like a beehive without the buzz.”