And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or try...
And as terrible as this is, I get 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 escap...
A sunstruck instant that existed now and forever.
A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.
My head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
It’s crazy, she’d said, but I’d be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can’t think of a better
Rather in the way that the Roman Empire continued in a certain fashion to run itself even when there was no one left to run it and the reason behind it was entirely gone, much of this routine remained...
And how precious was life that two such friends, in so big world, should find each other again after so great separation?
. . .—we’d been there [at a restaurant] for hours, laughing over little things but being serious too, very grave, she being both generous and receptive (this was another thing about her; she listened,...
You are, and you are very very gifted at all the aspects of the business I don’t care to deal with, and you
There’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and al...
Their reality was far more interesting than any idealized version could possibly be
The minibar cart, even church clocks tolling the hour, de Westertoren, Krijtberg, a dark edge to the clangor, an inwrought fairy-tale sense of doom. By day I sat on the foot of the bed straining to pu...
Still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier,
Relief,
Overly sensitive to the souls of rooms and objects, the emanations
Ominously—a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.
My own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And
Like a stray dog hungry for affection, I felt some profound shift in allegiance, blood-deep, a sudden, humiliating, eyewatering conviction of this place is good, this person is safe, I can trust him,...
Is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons. —SCHILLER