Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coff...
I’d yearned for the darkness and repose of Hobie’s house, its crowded rooms and old-wood smell, tea leaves and tobacco smoke, bowls of oranges on the sideboard and candlesticks scalloped with puddled...
It’s the place where reality strikes the ideal, where a joke becomes serious and anything serious is a joke. The magic point where every idea and its opposite are equally true.
It’s a big shift. I don’t know quite how to explain it. Between wanting and not wanting, caring and not caring. Of course it’s a lot more than that too. Shock and aura. Things are stronger and brighte...
It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I ofte...
If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see and think and feel, you don't think, 'oh I love this painting because it's universal' 'I love this painting because it speaks...
I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty’s death, Andy’s death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door,
I was worried that my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way.
I was in the Midwest, and the rain was all I had left of Camilla’s goodbye kiss. Raindrops on the windshield, radio stations fading in and out. Cornfields bleak in all those gray, wide-open reaches. I...
I waited, uncertainly, my eyes on the Japanese chest. It was a beauty, a prize for a retired sea-captain's home in backwater Boston: scrimshaw and cowrie shells, Old Testament samplers cross-stitched...
I waited for him to pick up the thread again—and when he didn't, we sat there peacefully, while I sipped my cooling tea (Lapsang Souchong, smoky and peculiar) and felt the strangeness of my life, and...
I think this goes more to the idea of ‘relentless irony’ than ‘divine providence.’ Yes—but why give it a name? Can’t they both be the same thing?
I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever.
I often thought how peculiar my life must look to someone reading those letters, far away.
I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances, he said. It's not that we're so smart, it's just that we don't look like we did it. We might as well be a bunch of Sunday-school teachers a...
I felt like a lifetime had come and gone since my night with Pippa and I thought how happy I'd been, rushing to meet her in the sharp-edged winter darkness, my elation at spotting her under a streetla...
I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end:
Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark – jelly and bloat, the muddy pit. I had seen the shadow of it on Bunny’s face – stupid terror; the whole wo...
His warmth, which seemed to presume upon some happy old intimacy we did not share, had thrown me into awkwardness.
God has tortured Theo plenty. If suffering makes noble, then he is a prince.