He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.
A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.That’s only three.Alvis finished his wine. You have to do disappointment twice.
You broke up two marriages, and faked a young woman’s illness, and bribed her to get an abortion—all in the first chapter—
The scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound—when the truth was that it had...
Words and emotions are simple currencies. If we inflate them, they lose their value, just like money. They begin to mean nothing.
What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he is dead?
This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.
Stories are nations, empires.
Other women were like presents he was constantly disappointed in unwrapping
In fact, he talked about his painful and insidious cancer so plainly and without affect that to this day, I consider matter-of-factness a form of courage.
If London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet
Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. Your take is what counts.
How do you think it should end? Young Pasquale considered the question. Well, instead of going back to America during the war, he could go to Germany and try to kill Hitler. Ah, Alvis Bender said. Yes...
His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about. Please, Pasquale rasped to Tommaso. Go. The
He wondered if the German girl ever knew that someone had loved her so much that he painted her twice on the cold cement wall of a machine-gun pillbox.
But aren’t all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos—we know what’s out there. It’s what isn’t that truly compels us. Technology may...
The scramble to get higher, to be seen, the cycle of creation and rebellion, everyone assuming they were saying something new or doing something new, something profound--when the truth was tat it had...
Parenthood makes such sweet hypocrites of us all.
We want what we want—we love who we love.
These are the ruins of our memories, which loom in our minds like the Parthenon, even as they are decayed and weathered by time and regret.