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 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 could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
I could do what I had to. I’d done it before: gone blank, pushed forward.
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...
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...
Hobie's presence below stairs was an anchor, a friendly weight...
He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life.
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...
George Sanders's had been the best, an Old Hollywood classic, my father had known it by heart and liked to quote from it.
From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right fo...
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.
Eso era el cuerpo: falible, sujeto a achaques. Enfermedad, dolor. ¿Por qué la gente se acaloraba tanto sobre ello?
Cuanto más agitas los árboles más hojas caen de ellos.
But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
But just when I thought I was going to get away, the creaky machinery of his face began to grind and a cardboard dawn of recognition was lowered, with jerks, from the dusty proscenium.
Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primi...
And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate.
And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that’s nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again.