I knew my mother’s feet, her clothes, her two-tone black and white shoes - and long after I was sure of it I made myself stand in their midst, folded deep inside myself like a sick pigeon with its eye...
I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backward glance at the ghost of his only...
I had never been to Brooklyn and didn't know a thing about it but I liked the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a b...
I find myself fixing on that refusal to pull back. Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome,...
I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inh...
I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and r...
I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is catast...
I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and...
Hordes of people on the street, lighted Christmas trees sparkling high on penthouse balconies and complacent Christmas music floating out of shops, and weaving in and out of crowds I had a strange fee...
For a moment I was disoriented, seized by panic; could a ghost embody itself through wavelengths, electronic dots, a picture tube? What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a...
Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I'd been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.
Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was n longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest o...
Even if it meant that she had failed, she was glad. And if what she'd wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she'd known it was impossible...
Eugene accepted the legitimacy of such phenomena, much as he and his brothers accepted the pageantry and feuds of World Federation professional wrestling, not caring much if some of the matches were f...
Es terrible aprender de niño que uno es algo separado del resto del mundo, que nada ni nadie sufre con nosotros cuando nos escaldamos la lengua o nos hacemos un rasguño en una rodilla, que nuestros ma...
Es peligroso ignorar la existencia de lo irracional. Cuanto más cultivada es una persona, cuanto más inteligente y más reprimida, más necesita algún medio de canalizar los impulsos primitivos que tant...
En el negocio de las antigüedades no existía lo que se entiende por un precio «justo». El valor objetivo —el de catálogo— no significaba nada. Si aparecía un cliente despistado con dinero en la mano (...
Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one a...
Death is the mother of beauty, said Henry. And what is beauty? Terror. Well said, said Julian. Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.
Dead flowers stood rotting in the massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the air almost too stale to breathe, the exact, suffocating feel of our apartment when Mrs. Barbou...