I presented him with an African violet, which I saw as symbolically useful, though I’m not sure the others understood the subtleties. (African violets must be watered from the bottom, not the top, and...
Curiously, she is not afraid, knowing as she does that love is mostly the avoidance of hurt, and furthermore, she is accustomed to obstacles, and how they can be overcome by readjusting her glance or...
Nothing she didor saidwas quitewhat she meantbut still her lifecould be called a monumentshaped in a slantof available light
It was as though she had veered, accidentally, into her own life.
Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us. Our own memory is altogether too cherishing, which i...
This last year she has been in danger of becoming an eccentric or else one of those persons who does not bother to put a saucer under her cup.
Eventually, everything gets stuck between a pair of parentheses or buried in the bottom of a trunk.
She herself loved the character of Elizabeth Bennet. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her a...
Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place, we are swept up, suddenly, between the body's smoothe, functioning predictability, and the need for disruption. We do irrational...
So this is where the years of maturity deliver us - to this needy, selfish, unwieldy wish to be somebody else's first and primal other.
Our friendship is made up of these brief frenzied exchanges, but the quality of our conversation, for all its feverish outpouring, is genuine.
He observed how his feet chose each wrong turning, working against his navigational instincts, circling and repeating, and bringing on a feverish detachment. Someone older than himself paced inside hi...
Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.