Along with preadolescence came a more pressing desire for escape. I read more widely, more indiscriminately, and mostly with an interest in how far a book could take me from my life and how long it co...
There were many occasions on which I had to skim as rapidly as I could to get through those survey courses that gave us two weeks to finish Don Quixote, ten days for War and Peace, courses designed to...
That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered.
Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing.
He claimed to be a Marxist, the only one of his claims I believed. He had that Marxist passion for oysters and good Sancerre, and that Marxist paralysis when the waiter brought the check. Already it’s...
She takes me so seriously, much too seriously, and then thinks about her queer little sister for a long time afterwards, looks searchingly at me, at every word I say, and keeps on thinking: ‘Is this j...
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Who would you rather live with, a bunch of bonobos feeling good? Or chimpanzees eating each other's babies? Or humans waterboarding each other and destroying the planet?
There it sat under my skull with my mind gripped in its tentacles. Sometimes dormant. Sometimes awakening and squeezing. Again I would react,
The ocean knew where her sailor was. We have seen him, said the waves. He is sleeping with us. You will never kiss his lips or feel the weight of his body again.
The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we...
Sometimes only in retrospect do we realize that we have wasted our best years looking for a lost, inappropriate first love, that our life-changing passion for a particular person was no more than the...
If I were like Lionel, I would write a book: Obvious Lies, Bad Advice, and Wrong Information I’ve Gotten from Men. A book? An encyclopedia! But in this case my friend was right.
I'm out of the equation, an innocent bystander at the major love affair Joan is having with Joan
I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if…there weren...
I am struck most strongly by her introspection, solitude, perfect self-awareness and sense of purpose…The beauty and truth of her words have transcended the limits placed upon her life by the darkness...
But love is strange, as they used to say at the Chameleon Club. Even those of us who value intelligence over appearance have discovered, to our chagrin, that a high IQ doesn't necessarily translate in...
Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.
Good writing should be grasped at once—in a second.
Decision. I was tired of his jealousy, sick of his belief that the only permissible topic of conversation was his unrecognized genius.