He waits a long time. The captain reviews the fingernails
He says, This hotel is very cheap, ma cherie. The innkeeper behind the desk said our room was forty francs a night but only twenty francs if we made our own bed. He listens to her breathe. So I said,...
Don't tell lies. Lie to yourself, Werner, but don't lie to me.
Do we choose who we love?
Disgrace is not to fall but to lie.
Crack. Pause. Crack. Pause. Then the long scream as the
Breitenau. The first policeman
Will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause. You will forgo comforts; you will live by duty alone. You will eat country and breathe nation.
Thumb. Marie-Laure’s father is principal locksmith for the National Museum of Natural History. Between the laboratories, warehouses, four separate public museums, the menagerie, the greenhouses, the a...
They stand.
The network of trenches and artillery below shows itself very clearly for a moment, and Werner feels he is gazing down into the circuitry of an enormous radio, each soldier down there an electron flow...
La pomme
Chitons.
Byzantine complication: Mondays are for mechanics,
A magnificent high tide arrives, the largest waves smashing against the bases of the ramparts, the
You know how diamonds—how all crystals—grow, Laurette? By adding microscopic layers, a few thousand atoms every month, each atop the next. Millennia after millennia. That’s how stories accumulate too.
Why do we have to sleep in this little bedroom? I’m sure we could clean out a downstairs room if you’d like. What about the room across the
When Werner wakes, it’s well past dawn. His head aches and his eyeballs feel heavy. Frederick is already dressed, wearing trousers, an ironed shirt, and a necktie, kneeling against the window with his...
Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn’t life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it.
Violins, horns, drums, speeches—a mouth against a microphone in some faraway yet simultaneous evening—the sorcery of it holds him rapt.