I still don’t understand this, Albie said, pointing at Franny and then at Leo. How did he wind up with my life? It isn’t your life, Leo said. That’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s my imagination.
I loved her even as she was swimming away from me, even as I was hating her. That’s the way it is, when you’ve loved somebody your whole life. It’s like a direction you go in, even when you don’t want...
I like the Catholic Church, she says to me sometimes. Good thing, I say, which always makes her laugh. I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into on...
I have just reread The Age of Innocence. Poor Countess Olenska, so much more alive than everyone in New York. She was better than Newland Archer, to whom she couldn’t give herself because she was marr...
I decided I was going to make up a novel, and that the novel was going to get me out of the restaurant. The novel was going to be my getaway car.
Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling
He realized then what he had known from the first minute he saw her, from when she leaned out the kitchen door and called for her husband. This was the start of his life.
He did not understand how such a short time in this house could have returned him to adolescence.
He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations re...
GAWKING IS A LOOK stronger than a stare. The gawk was full of brazen curiosity, pity, and fear, every unattractive human emotion rolled into one unflattering facial expression.
From his endless work had come a great industry, great personal gain, but happiness? It was a word he would have puzzled over, unable to understand it's importance even while it's meaning was evident.
French wine was the cornerstone of French diplomacy. They handed it out like peppermints.
Franny looked at them up on the porch, everyone softened by the veil of the screen, by the light that was slanting in behind them, by the bank of yellow lilies that separated them from her. It was not...
Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive mysel...
But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do.
But it never worked that way, and the sex just made her lonelier. I understood that, as it had made me lonelier too. I could never remember being lonely, certainly not in this way, until I had seen th...
At the time I thought this was my big chance for love, that I was going something very romantic and important, but looking back on it now, it all seems part of a very simple equation: I left the house...
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft.
All four of the boys were frozen, mesmerized, the weirdest chill washing over their skin while they watched this miraculous growing animal devouring the earth in every direction, every direction where...