Was it wrong, wanting to sleep late with the covers over my head and wander around a peaceful house with old seashells in drawers and wicker baskets of folded upholstery fabric stored under the parlor...
Was ist, wenn einer zufällig von einem Herzen besessen ist, dem nicht zu trauen ist? Wenn dein tiefstes Inneres dich singend zum Scheiterhaufen lockt, sollst du dich dann lieber abwenden, dir die Ohre...
Walking into the library, I took in my breath sharply and stopped: glass fronted bookcases and Gothic panels, stretching fifteen feet to a frescoed and plaster-medallioned ceiling. In the back of the...
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...
Unsettled heart. The fetishism of secrecy. These people understood—as I did—the back alleys of the soul, whispers and shadows, money slipping from hand to hand, the password, the code, the second self...
Und so gern ich an eine Wahrheit jenseits der Illusion glauben würde, glaube ich doch inzwischen, dass es sie nicht gibt, denn zwischen der Realität auf der einen Seite und dem Punkt, an dem der Geist...
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...
Took
Too much—too tempting—to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplica...
Though I would have died rather than told anyone, I was worried my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily appa...
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...