But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all 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...
I’d felt drowned and extinguished by vastness—not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impassable distances between people even when they were within arm’s reach of each other, an...
Even Proust—there’s a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she’s sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment,...
—No—wait. I’m coming back.
І чим далі я йшов, тим більший смуток мене опановував, що я втратив іще одну стабільну й надійну пристань у світі, про яку завжди думав, що вона вже нікуди від мене не дінеться: знайомі обличчя, радіс...
Σίγουρα ποτέ δεν μπόρεσε να καταλάβει γιατί ηταν υποχρεωμένη να ζει σε τόση δυστυχία :σκιαγμένη απο θορύβους ,πνιγμένη στον καπνό, με σκυλιά να γαβγίζουν, μυρωδιές από φαγητά που μαγειρεύονταν, μεθύστ...
Și sper că există aici și un adevăr mai mare despre suferință, sau cel puțin despre felul cum o înțeleg eu - deși am ajuns să-mi dau seama că singurele adevăruri care contează pentru mine sunt cele pe...
The space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.
And leaving
When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change. Your descriptions of the desert—that oceanic, endless glare—are terrible but...
When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a glancing sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle,...
What if you had never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you'd ever seen was a child's picture - blue crayon, choppy waves? Would you know the real sea if you only knew the picture? Would you...
There was a grand piano, too, and Charles was playing, a glass of whiskey on the seat beside him. He was a little drunk; the Chopin was slurred and fluid, the notes melting sleepily into one another....
There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.
The value of Greek prose composition, he said, [was that] if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced in...
The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny;...
Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practi...
Some time in October, right around Day of the Dead actually, I stayed in a Mexican seaside hotel where the halls flowed with blown curtains and all the rooms were named after flowers. The Azalea Room,...
Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things-- naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror-- are too terrible to really ever grasp at all.
She was wearing a man's nightshirt, much too big for her, and I found myself staring at her bare legs—tawny calves, slender ankles, lovely, dusty-soled boyfeet.