Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish. I thought later how simply and quickly they had introduced that concept to me, as easily as breaking a little finger. For some reason...
I've read there is no such thing as a single tear, that old poetic trope. And perhaps there isn't, since hers was simply a companion to my own.
I've noticed Dracula was often as practical a fellow as he was a nasty one.
For the first time in all the years I remembered, all the years in which my father had sheltered me from the loneliness of life with no mother, no siblings, no home country, all the years of his being...
But sometimes a man who is very good thinks, I am very bad, and it—destructs his life, everything. Because he does not believe that he has any right to do something, so he does less and less.
And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?
When the sun rose at the quarry it turned the world lavender and gold. After
Perhaps when you live your entire life among such scenes, they do not register as beauty but as the world itself—
Nave
Today I will go to wait for her again, because I cannot help it, because my whole being seems now to be bound up in the being of one so different from myself and yet so exquisitely familiar that I can...
Marriages are like certain books, a story where you turn the last page and you think it's over and then there's an epilogue, and after that you're inclined to go on wondering about the characters or i...
It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into the golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides f...
I've always been interested in foreign relations. It's my belief that study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present rather than an escape from it.
I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist.
I understood in a flash that I must keep my mind safe, whatever came next. I believe now that it was not only enormous luck that brought me this understanding the very first day, but also my habit of...
He was my husband, my apartment mate, my soul mate, the father of the little plant in my confused soil, the lover who had made me adore his body without inhibition after my years of relative solitude,...
Doesn't every love express itself this way, with the seeds of both its flowering and its ruin in the very first words, the first breath, the first though?
I knew people who dreamed all the time about going somewhere else, and they let that ruin their lives. When you are not allowed to do something, it often becomes very important.
I was filled with angst in college, that I struggled with the question of my future, the meaning of my life - spoiled sheltered rich girl collides with great books and is devastated by her own banalit...