Whatever else one may say about guilt, it certainly lends one diabolical powers of invention;
We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than u...
This whole town is like a big Fuck You to Thoreau.
The smells, the shadows, even the dappled pale trunks of the plane trees lifted my spirits
The months subsequent were an endless dreary battle of paperwork, full of stalemates, fought in trenches.
The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I’m reminded of the past at every turn.
That’s the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it.
That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it.
Tenemos el arte para no morir de la verdad. NIETZSCHE
She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose white scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze;
Nitric acid. Lampblack. Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time. The effects of time, visible and invisible.
Most of the benches bore the names of benefactors—in memory of Mrs. Ruth Klein or whatever—but my mother’s bench, the Rendezvous Point, alone of all the benches in that part of the park had been given...
Mis sueños nunca llegaban a ser pesadillas en toda regla sino solo interludios perturbados en los que mi madre se quedaba trabajando hasta tarde y no encontraba ningún medio de transporte para volver...
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 was sometimes difficult to believe that Dr. Roland was a tenured professor in the Social Science Department of this, a distinguished college. He was more like some gabby old codger who would sit ne...
It was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static,...
It was as if I’d suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of l...
In recent years they had fallen in with a gabby, childless couple, older than they were, called the MacNatts. Mr. MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs. MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avo...
If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yours...
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,