I remember a story I read once, a soldier, was it at Shiloh? He was talking to me but not with his whole attention. Gettysburg? a soldier so mad with shock that he started burying birds and squirrels...
It made me think of the nice old Marimekko-clad ladies I sometimes went to see in the Ritz Tower: gravel-voiced, turban-wearing, panther-braceleted widows looking to move to Miami, their apartments fi...
From the sound of it, had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction.
Elle ne s'intéressait pas aux livres dans lesquels les enfants grandissaient, car (dans la vie comme en littérature) ce processus entrainait un affaiblissement accéléré et inexplicable du caractère ;...
What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to A...
Everything was hysterically funny, even the playground slide was smiling at us, and at some point, deep in the night, when we were winging on the jungle gym and showers of sparks were flying out of ou...
When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change.
Maybe the one had to be lost for the others to be found?
Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.
From the window, above the clatter of pots and the slamming of cabinets, Francis was singing, as though it was the happiest song in the world: 'We are the little black sheep who have gone astray . . ....
From his genial cursing, his infrequent shaving, the relaxed way he talked around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, it was almost as if he were playing a character: some cool guy from a fiftie...
Una cosa era ver un cuadro en un museo, pero contemplarlo bajo todas esas luces, estados anímicos y estaciones diferentes era apreciarlo de mil formas distintas; guardarlo encerrado en la oscuridad —u...
Asparagus is in season.
Es una locura, pero sería feliz mirando los mismos seis cuadros el resto de mi vida. No se me ocurre una forma mejor de enloquecer.
Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.
What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and al...
I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence.
But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.
They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down...
Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful? he said. It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever...