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...
God’ as reference to long-term pattern we can’t decipher.
Real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from...
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?
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.
Though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
Loose tendons; dance world's loss; performance art's gain
Coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?
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...
The stray chance that might, or might not, change everything.
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...
The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, wr...
That life -- whatever else it is -- is short.
No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.
Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever.
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...
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...
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.
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...
BEFORE BORIS, I HAD borne my solitude stoically enough, without realizing quite how alone I was.