Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
Do you have any idea why you might be feeling better?No, not really, I said curtly. Better wasn’t even the word for how I felt. There wasn’t a word for it. It was more that things too small to mention...
Won’t last, it’s
Well, girls always love assholes, said Platt, not bothering to dispute this. Haven't you noticed? No, I thought bleakly, untrue. Else why didn't Pippa love me?
Things would have turned out better is she had lived. As it was, she died when I was kid;and thought everything that happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost...
The absurd does not liberate; it binds. —ALBERT CAMUS
Occasionally a car swooshed by in the rain and its headlights would swing round momentarily and illuminate the room-the pool table, snowshoes on the wall and the rowing machine, the armchair in which...
In the first week of April the weather turned suddenly, unseasonably, insistently lovely. The sky was blue, the air warm and windless, and the sun beamed on the muddy ground with all the sweet impatie...
I had a feeling of déjà vu when, the next afternoon, Julian answered the door exactly as he had the first time, by opening it only a crack and looking through it warily, as if there were something won...
You have an unusual equipment for fate, exercise with care!’
We had not spoken about the incident in my room several nights before and, in the drowsy silence of the car, I felt the need to make things plain.You know, Francis, I said.What?It seemed the best thin...
The little white bundle—toddling dutifully down the hall to the front door—froze. Then a high-pitched scream as he began to run as fast as he could (which was not very fast at all, any more) and Boris...
Somehow the present had shrunk into a smaller and much less interesting place.
I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject) I now see that he...
Fallo cardíaco individual. Tu sueño, el sueño de Welty, el sueño de Vermeer. Tú ves un cuadro, yo veo otro, el libro de arte lo pone a cierta distancia, la mujer que compra la postal en la tienda de r...
Bleakly, Harriet gazed out into the antiseptic gloom. A weight lay upon her, and a darkness. She’d learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the...
And though it's a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I've never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical li...
Rain—was grappling for her wallet. Maybe
Only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand.
This piece, not of the first quality, doesn’t fit with anything else I own, and yet isn’t it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn’t quite work, that’s oddly the dearest?