It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we shiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own...
It was an obscure specialization, but the candlelit and treacherous universe in which they moved - of sin unpunished, of innocence destroyed - was one I found appealing. Even the titles of their plays...
It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all;and it is with him that i am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basicall...
In the surprised silence that followed, a champagne cork popped in the kitchen, a burst of laughter. It was just past midnight: two minutes into Christmas Day. Then my father leaned back in his chair,...
If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.
I was jarred - a little spooked as well - at so blatant a reference to something referred to, by mutual agreement, almost exclusively with codes, catchwords, a hundred different euphemisms.It was the...
I thought they spoke Russian in the Ukraine. Well, yes. Depends what part of Ukraine. They’re not so different languages, the two.
I supposed that when anyone accustomed to working with the mind is faced with a straightforward action, there's a tendency to embellish, to make it overly clever. On paper there's a certain symmetry....
I see you’re taking French. The French Club meets once a week, in a French restaurant on University Place. And on Tuesdays they go up to the Alliance Française and watch French-language movies.
I see so little of you these days, Richard, he said. I feel that you’re becoming just a shadow in my life.
I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew...
I met her my first year of college, and was initially attracted to her because she seemed an intelligent, brooding malcontent like myself; but after about a month, during which time she’d firmly glued...
I hated being around people, couldn’t pay attention to what anyone was saying, couldn’t talk to clients, couldn’t tag my pieces, couldn’t ride the subway, human activity seemed pointless, incomprehens...
I hate Gucci,' said Francis.'Do you?' said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. 'Really? I think it's rather grand.''Come on, Henry.''Well, it's so expensive, but it's so ugly too, isn't it? I think t...
How was it that a complex, a nervous and delicately calibrated mind like my own, was able to adjust itself perfectly after a shock like the murder, while Bunny’s eminently more sturdy and ordinary one...
He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little sp...
Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly mi...
He would deny this is confronted, citing evasively his affection for Dante and Giotto, but anything overtly religious filled him with a pagan alarm; and I believe that like Pliny, whom he resembled in...
Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.