And the farther I walked away, the more upset I got, at the loss of one of the few stable and unchanging docking-points in the world that I had taken for granted: familiar faces, glad greetings: hey m...
Wade straight through life, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and heart open.
And as much as I wanted to, I knew I couldn't turn around, that to look at her directly was to violate the laws of her world and mine; she had come to me the only way she could, and our eyes met in th...
Where’s the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I’ve seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can dest...
Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is giving you a secret message. He’s telling you that living things don’t last—it’s all temporar...
It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
If I had grown up in that house I couldn't have loved it more, couldn't have been more familiar with the creak of the swing, or the pattern of the clematis vines on the trellis, or the velvety swell o...
I accepted all this counsel politely, with a glassy smile and a glaring sense of unreality. Many adults seemed to interpret this numbness as a positive sign; I remember particularly Mr. Beeman (an ove...
For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage.
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...
Does such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
Buffalo is a long way from New York City; but apart from a dreamlike, feverish stop in Syracuse, where I walked and watered Popper and bought us a couple of cheese danishes because there wasn’t anythi...
And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?"If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.
Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.
What’s worth living for? what’s worth dying for? what’s completely foolish to pursue?
Und bei diesem strammen kleinen Porträt ist es nicht schwer, das Menschliche in dem Finken zu sehen. Würdevoll, verwundbar. Ein Gefangener, der einen anderen anschaut.
Qualunque cosa ci insegni a parlare con noi stessi è importante qualunque cosa ci insegni a cullarci fino a uscire dalla disperazione.
Mine, mine. Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist.
For weeks, I’d been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was a...
At home, my mother had known how to suffocate my dad's anger by growing silent, a low, unwavering flame of contempt that sucked all the oxygen out of the room and made everything he said and did seem...