Nd isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or tryi...
Music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky
Maybe that’s what’s waiting for us at the end of the journey, a majesty unimaginable until the very moment we find ourselves walking through the doors of it, what we find ourselves gazing at in astoni...
Living things don’t last—it’s all temporary. Death in life. That’s why they’re called natures mortes. Maybe you don’t see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you...
Happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?
Great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to ch...
Gallows
Four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone—it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great...
Despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I’d liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I’d met him was that he was never afraid. You didn’t meet many peop...
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 now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.
Between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur...
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...
Because the thing he hadn’t understood then (he was happier not knowing it) was that once you were in prison, you never got out. People treated you like a different person; you tended to backslide, th...
Beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has t...
[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...
[Hobie]Theo. His hug was strong and parental, and so fierce that it made me cry even harder. Then his hand was on my shoulder, heavy anchoring hand that was security and authority itself; he was leadi...
Zidovi boje cimeta, kiša na prozorskim daskama, zamašna tišina i osjećaj dubine i daljine, poput laka na pozadini slike iz devetnaestog stoljeća.
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,...