How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Cr...
But my loyalties were elsewhere. And the flavor of Pippa’s kiss—bittersweet and strange—stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and...
But it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history i...
And, in this staunch little portrait, it’s hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another. But who knows what Fabritius intended? There’s not enough of...
And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say toyou, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgentlyas if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whateverelse it is...
A love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.
И аз чувствам, че има нещо много сериозно, много важно, което трябва да ти кажа, мой несъществуващи читателю, и чувствам, че трябва да го кажа така настоятелно, както ако стоях в стаята пред теб. Че ж...
Coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?
You have an unusual equipment for fate, exercise with care!’
What if the pattern is pre-set? No no – hang on
Um, we don’t hit women in America. He scowled, and spit out an apple seed. No. Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them.
The dead appear to us in dreams because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star...
She'd heard the stories so often that she knew them by heart, could repeat them if she wanted, sometimes even dash in a detail or two neglected in the retelling [...]. The stories were familiar much a...
She did not care for children’s books in which the children grew up, as what growing up entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character; out of a clear blue sky the...
Over 2,000 reptiles await you.
On she prattled, friendly as a parrot. But my loyalties were elsewhere. And the flavour of Pippa's kiss - bittersweet and strange - stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sail...
Nos miramos durante un largo y extraño momento que nunca he olvidado, como dos animales que se encuentran al atardecer, y de sus ojos pareció brotar una clara chispa de simpatía; vi la criatura que er...
La línea de la belleza no cambia por mucho que haya pasado cientos de veces por una fotocopiadora.
It's commonplace to say that we 'love' a book, but when we say it, we mean all sorts of things. Sometimes we mean that a book was important to us in out youth, though we haven't picked it up in years;...
It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to lose control completely? To throw off all the chai...