Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.
But I couldn’t. It was real; I knew it, even in the dark. Raised yellow streak of paint on the wing and feathers scratched in with the butt of the brush. One chip on the upper left edge that hadn’t be...
An object—any object—was worth whatever you could get somebody to pay for it.
Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we want to impress.
For Hobie, who sorrowed over these elegant old remnants as if they were underfed children or mistreated cats, it was a point of duty to rescue what he could and then with his gifts as carpenter and jo...
Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it.
¿quién dijo que la coincidencia es la manera que Dios tiene de permanecer anónimo?
Loose tendons; dance world's loss; performance art's gain
We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother’s funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn’t work.
The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the t...
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 little guy, said Boris in the car on the way to Antwerp. You know the painter saw him-he wasn't painting that bird from his mind, you know? That's a real little guy, chained up on the wall, there...
No second chances.
Mr. MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs. MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon.
It’s a perfectly handy skill for any boy to know. Certainly it is, if he needs to hail a passing tugboat.
It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons. —SCHILLER
It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don't know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web o...
It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing, he said. You are like children. Afraid of the dark.
I realized that the childish impression I had always had of my father, as Just Lawgiver, was entirely wrong. We were utterly dependent on this man, who was not only deluded and ignorant, but incompete...
How was it possible to miss someone as much as I missed my mother? I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater.