When he undressed at night he was like a diplomat or a judge. A white body, gentle and powerless, emerged from his clothes, his position in the world lay tumbled on the floor, fallen from his ankles.....
There were other houses that always brought images of an orderly life, kitchens with plain sideboards, old windows, the comforts of marriage in their common form, which at times surpassed everything—b...
There was a time, usually late in August, when summer struck the trees with dazzling power and they were rich with leaves but then became, suddenly one day, strangely still, as if in expectation and a...
She comes to life with a soft exhausted sound, like someone saved from drowning.
ONE OF THE LAST GREAT REALIZATIONS is that life will not be what you dreamed.
Jivan: You think when you have love that love is easy to find, that everyone has it. It's not true. It's very hard to find.Nedra: I haven't been looking for it.Jivan: It's like a tree...It takes a lon...
Either that, he said, or it comes true later. I’ll tell you another story. There was a father who gave his son a shotgun. It was very small. It was a luparetta. So the son went to school, and he met a...
DEAD FLIES ON THE SILLS OF sunny windows, weeds along the pathway, the kitchen empty. The house was melancholy, deceiving; it was like a cathedral where, amid the serenity, something is false, the sai...
Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or...
THERE ARE THINGS I LOVE ABOUT marriage. I love the familiarity of it, Nedra said. It’s like a tattoo. You wanted it at the time, you have it, it’s implanted in your skin, you can’t get rid of it. You’...
Summer mornings, the light of the world pouring in and the silence. It was a barefoot life, the cool of the night on the floorboards, the green trees if you stepped outside, the first faint cries of t...
One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards.Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwe...
It's just that it's hard to believe in greatness...
Dingen die je geschreven hebt, rijpen niet met je mee, zo lijkt me althans. De waarheid ervan kan bepaald zijn door de tijd, maar er bestaat niet zoiets als bij de tijd zijn wanneer de tijd voorbij is...
Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more know...
The heart is in darkness, unknowing, like those animals in mines that have never seen the day. It has no loyalties, no hopes; it has its task.
I am going to describe her life from the inside outward, from its core, the house as well, rooms in which life was gathered, rooms in which the morning sunlight, the floors spread with Oriental rugs t...
He lived in it helplessly as we live in our bodies when we are older.
Great lovers lie in hell, the poet says. Even now, long afterwards, I cannot destroy the images. They remain within me like the yearnings of an addict. I need only hear certain words, see certain gest...
For those we are born to speak to we need prepare nothing, the lines are ready, everything is there.