A starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that’s not even to mention...
You know that thing Julian used to say,' said Francis. 'Which thing?''About a Hindu saint being able to slay a thousand on the battlefield and it not being a sin unless he felt remorse.
You amaze me, he said. You think nothing exists if you can't see it.
With the striped umbrella and the pistachio ices?
Who was it that said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?
What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance
Well, a change of scenery may be good for you, said Hobie when I went down to see him before I left. Even if the scene isn't what you'd choose.
We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?’
We can’t choose what we want and don’t want and that’s the hard lonely truth. Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us. We can’t escape who we are.
Un grande dolore, che comincio a comprendere solo adesso: il cuore non si sceglie. Non possiamo obbligarci a desiderare ciò che è bene per noi o per gli altri. Non siamo noi a determinare il tipo di p...
Though he didn't treat them as equals - he didn't treat anyone as an equal, actually - neither did he resort to the condescending friendliness of the wealthy.
The sky was a rich, mindless, never-ending blue, like a promise of some ridiculous glory that wasn’t really there.
The man shrank. It was funny, but people never seemed to notice at first glance how big. Henry was. Maybe it was because of his clothes, which were like one of those lame but curiously impenetrable di...
The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes I dreamed of always began like this. I could lose myself forever in that singular li...
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. That maybe even if w...
She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone.
She was as cool as dammit.
She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief.
Raviv and Avi, and—my favorite—a Russian Jew named Grisha. ( ‘Russian Jew’ contradiction in terms, he explained, in a lavish plume of menthol smoke. To Russian mind anyway. Since ‘Jew’ to antisemite m...