Somehow the present had shrunk into a smaller and much less interesting place.
Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, priv...
In fact, I can't think of much I'd like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: 'Dicki...
Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.
And her laugh was enough to make you want to kick over what you were doing and follow her down the street.
. . it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.
There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life t...
There 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.
Janet who said excellent! in answer to everything and drank coffee from a pink mug that said Janet.
It seemed my wholelife was composed of these disjointedfractions of time, hanging around in onepublic place and then another, as if I werewaiting for trains that never came. And, likeone of those ghos...
In high school I developed a habit of wandering through shopping malls after school, swaying through the bright, chill mezzanines until I was so dazed with consumer goods and product codes, with prome...
I mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. So...
Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henr...
What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?
But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
Only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand.
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 least I could do was be kind to his mother and sister. It didn’t occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I’d roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorpt...
Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading,...
In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.