Enough to show the black
Credulous father, a distinguished judge who had spent his final
Changing the plan at the last moment. Oh, come on. The chicken can wait. Can’t it? Sure it can. He was talking a mile a minute. You can put the other thing back
But it was excruciating to emerge from my eerie submarine existence into this harsh stampede of noise and light.
Began to walk home, very quickly. A car full of high-school girls screeched around the corner. They were the girls who ran all the clubs and won all the elections in Allison’s high-school class: littl...
Animal in the sitter (a tendency that,
And sharp-faced, like Boris, but with an evil red-rimmed gaze and tiny, brownish sawteeth. He made me think of a rabid fox.
And felt the strangeness of the city pressing in all around me, smells of tobacco and malt and nutmeg, café walls the melancholy brown of an old leather-bound book and then beyond, dark passages and b...
An excuse to bring out the bottle of sherry and visit
A starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.
A few hours could change everything – or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.
[art] those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find.
[S]he came up suddenly beside me so I saw her reflection in a mirror. At the sight of her I was paralyzed with happiness; … [S]he was smiling at me, … not a dream but a presence that filled the whole...
[I] thought of that line from The Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining.
You wan't to know what Classics are? said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. I'll tell you what Clasdics are. War and homos. A sententious and vulgar statement,...
You sound like my dad. Well—let’s put it another way. Who was it said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous? Now you really sound like my dad. Who’s to say that gamblers don’t rea...
You didn’t meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it and at the same time such oddball and unthwartable faith in what, in childhood, he had liked to call...
You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever.
You amaze me, he said. You think nothing exists if you can't see it.
Y eso es lo que hacen todos los grandes maestros. Rembrandt. Velázquez. Lo último de Tiziano. Construyen la ilusión, el truco…, pero te acercas un paso más y se desintegra en pinceladas. Abstracto, co...