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...
That's odd,' said Henry. 'The first thing I thought of when I tasted that coffee was you.
Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing ou...
Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers—laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. That’s Life. That’s...
She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I’d lost with my mother.
She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.
Running might take her forward, it could even take her home; but it couldn’t take her back—not ten minutes, ten hours, not ten years or days.
Right, I said, after an off-balance pause. A knocker, in the trade, was a shark who charmed his way into old people’s homes: to cheat them of valuables
People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and...
Penso a ciò che mi disse Hobie: la bellezza cambia la venatura della realtà. E continuo a pensare anche a una verità più convenzionale: ovvero, che la ricerca della bellezza pura è una trappola, una s...
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...
Now of course, it would be easy for me to veer to the opposite extreme. I could say the secret of Julian's charm was that he latched on to young people who wanted to feel better than everybody else; t...
No siempre se saca el bien de las buenas obras ni el mal de las malas obras. Ni siquiera los sabios y los buenos pueden ver la finalidad de todas sus acciones.
Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abho...
La morte è la madre della bellezza disse Henry.E cos'è la bellezza?Terrore.Ben detto! esclamò Julian. La bellezza è raramente dolce o consolatoria. Quasi l'opposto. La vera bellezza è sempre un po' in...
It’s a terrible thing, what we did, said Francis abruptly. I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed. But still. It’s a shame. I feel bad about it.
It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own...
It was nothing I hadn't thought of, plenty, and in far less taxing circumstances; the urge shook me grandly and unpredictably, a poisonous whisper that never wholly left me, that on some days lingered...