This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch.
There was a nook in the house that contained what they called the Turkish Room, which was for intimate conversation. And when my mother had her sixth birthday, her grandmother led her into the Turkish...
There are no atheists in foxholes, and no liberals in bar fights, and what
The romance of your child's childhood may be the last romance you can give up.
The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small—to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways—to...
The logic of nationalism always flows downhill, toward the gutter.
It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed.
It is, I think, the journalist’s vice to believe that all history can instantly be reduced to experience: (Pierre, an out-of-work pipe fitter in the suburb of Boulougne, is typical of the new class of...
Family life is by its nature cocooned, and expatriate family life doubly so. We had many friends and a few intimate ones, but it is in the nature of family rhythm—up too early, asleep too soon—to plac...
_Not really liking it much_ is a precondition of art criticism of all kinds. /275
There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn’t.
There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time,...
A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, o...
Feeling for normal frailty and for mercy before justice and humanity before dogma,
The real crisis in France in fact is not economic (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) or even cultural (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) but linguistic. French has diminished as an...
After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.
We don't know that we've lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence. Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we've missed and can't name, and ou...