Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest.
What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?
What does he remember? He saw the engineer Bernd close the cellar door and sit on the stairs.
Werner can feel the fever flickering inside him, a stove with
Werner Pfennig grows up three hundred miles northeast of Paris in a place called Zollverein: a four-thousand-acre coalmining complex outside Essen, Germany. It’s steel country, anthracite country, a p...
We are young, they sing, we are steadfast, we have never compromised, we have so many castles yet to storm.
Vài người yếu kém trên phương diện nào đó. Người khác nhau thì mặt yếu kém khác nhau.
Tucked between the last two pages, she finds an old sealed envelope. He has written For Frederick across the front. Frederick: the bunkmate Werner used to write about, the boy who loved birds. He sees...
To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in s...
They look like scarecrows shipping west to be staked in some terrible garden.
They lie on their stomachs and page through comics, feeling the pleasure of being outside of school, glancing at each other now and then as if curious to learn whether their friendship will continue t...
They go down the ladder and clamber out through the wardrobe. No soldiers wait in the hall with guns drawn. Nothing seems different at all. A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science,...
There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing h...
There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.
Then a state-sponsored play out of Berlin begins: a story of invaders sneaking into a village at night. All twelve children sit riveted. In the play, the invaders pose as hook-nosed department-store o...
The way she tucks her ankles up against her bottom. The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.
The war drops its question mark. Memos are distributed. The collections must be protected. A small cadre of couriers has begun moving things to country estates. Locks and keys are in greater demand th...
The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.
The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe... The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the liv...
The only way to fall asleep is to stop trying to fall asleep. Sleep is a horizon: the harder you row toward it, the faster it recedes.