But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in memor...
From the beginning, then, but briefly.
From anywhere: where once he had feared that this immense city would set him adrift, a spinning atom in the ether, and where once he had seen in this the ultimate terror of insignificance, he now, and...
It was supposed to say Great Artist on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say such a good teacher/daughter/friend instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that...
You wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are.
I measure my life out in books. You should be measuring your life by living. Correction: you shouldn't be measuring your life. What's the point?
I want to make a difference. But get a job? I worry that will make the ordinary, like everybody else.
Brother, a swarthy barrel-maker whose Breton
Isn’t it funny, she said, stroking with an inky finger the beads of condensation on her glass of white wine, that year was such an unhappy one, for me. Remember poor Reza? And Skandar away so much—and...
He didn't much like reading novels - he preferred history or philosophy - or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem spoke to him it was as if a brilliant, a...
She wanted to remind him, whether his family was there or not. She wanted. And wanted. And endured in her wanting: the damp seat, the dry chicken, more champagne, the headache the champagne brought, t...
The Thwaites lived on Central Park West in the upper Eighties, in a building that, while manifestly grand, particularly to someone from Ohio, was by no means the most elegant among its neighbors. Its...
I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you’re taught to eat your greens before you have dessert.
I always thought I'd get farther. I'd like to blame the world for what I've failed to do, but the failure - the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit - is all...
But just as the world is opening up, it's closing too, and things reveal their previously unimagined shapes.
You could control what you did, if you wanted to....Was it efficient? Was it productive? ...So many people didn't bother -- a kind of stupidity...a lack of vision, or purpose. Anyone who said they jus...
I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong.
He said that’s what family is for: the people who love you see you in the best light, as you want to be seen.
It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when peo...
He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people’s. I see what he means, and because I’ve learned to be patie...