Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand...
Un acte qui nous prouverait, ainsi qu'à lui-même, qu'il était réellement possible de mettre en oeuvre les principes élevés que nous avait enseignés Julian. Je me rappelle son reflet dans le miroir al...
To try to make some meaning out of all this seems
This was extraordinary, as Mrs. Fountain was so cheap she washed out her old tinfoil to roll in a ball and use again,
They want it all as detailed as possible because even the tiniest things mean something. Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is givi...
They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it. And how can we lose this maddening
There wasn't a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.
There is a recurrent scene from those dinners that surfaces again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream. Julian, at the head of the long table, rises to his feet and lifts his wineglass...
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up.
The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag. 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?
The interesting thing, in the photograph, was how the fragile little knock-kneed boy—smiling sweetly, pristine in his sailor suit—was also the old man who’d clasped my hand while he was dying: two sep...
The group mind was such (private jokes and bemusement, everyone clustered round vacation videos on the iPhone) that it was hard to imagine any of them going to a movie by themselves or eating alone at...
The description of shock and grief hot so close to home: but sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out ov...
The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead sta...
The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws—this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos. Easy to see w...
That's odd,' said Henry. 'The first thing I thought of when I tasted that coffee was you.
One's thought patterns become different (...), when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to l...
Once, over dinner, Henry was quite startled to learn from me that men had walked on the moon. No, he said, putting down his fork. It’s true, chorused the rest, who had somehow managed to pick this up...
No— his hands came together on the table—it was one of the first antiques I ever bought, thirty years ago. In an American Folk sale. I’m not a great one for the folk art, never have been—this piece, n...