The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for...
I am like the Census, he said, broken down by age, sex and religion.
How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.
Na miłość boską, nie histeryzuj! - odburknęła. - Po prostu umieram, koniec kropka.
… a thief’s heart is an impetuous organ, and while inwardly he throbs for absolution, at the same time he can’t keep from bragging.
¿Qué tienen esos momentos intemporales que luego siempre se recuerdan con una dulce melancolía? A veces me parece que es en esos intervalos de vacío, sin que fuera consciente de ello, cuando he vivido...
What age is she now, twenty something. I’m not sure. She is very bright, quite the bluestocking. Not beautiful, however, I admitted that to myself long ago. I cannot pretend this is not a disappointme...
We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. That first death we witness will always be a murmur...
We did our best, Anna and I. We forgave each other for all we were not.
O my friends!- to be queer was very bliss. The fifties was the last great age of queerdom. All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but there young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamo...
Happy sadness, sad happiness, the story of my life and loves
Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense--have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes?
I am old now, or oldening ...
It was a sumptuous, oh, truly sumptuous autumn day, all Byzantine coppers and golds under a Tiepolo sky of enamelled blue, the countryside all fixed and glassy, seeming not so much itself as its own r...
In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of...
Her own mother had died when Anna was twelve and since then father and daughter had faced the world like a pair of nineteenth-century adventurers, a riverboat gambler, say, and his alibi girl.
But why at least? What a business it is, the human discourse. I
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
Yes, another April; in a way, in this story, it is always April.