The moral bottom had dropped out of my world without changing a mote of sunlight.
She was his potchke, his fleutchke, his notchke, his motchke, his everything that the speech of St. Botolphs left unexpressed. She was his little, little squirrel.
Of the four poets with whom Bascomb was customarily grouped one had shot himself, one had drowned himself, one had hanged himself, and the fourth had died of delirium tremens.
Nada le esperaba en su apartamento. No había ni una mujer, ni un hombre, ni un perro, ni un gato, y probablemente la cinta de su contestador automático estaría en blanco; además, el barrio donde vivía...
Lo que sentía por Eduardo era más parecido a la nostalgia que al espíritu aventurero del amor tradicional, pero no era un sentimiento menos fuerte. Comprendió que, si verdaderamente buscaba la pureza,...
If there was anything really wrong with Shady Hill, anything that you could put your finger on, it was the fact that the village had no public library – no foxed copies of Pascal, smelling of cabbage;...
I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.
I am like a prisoner who is trying to escape from jail by the wrong route. For all one knows, that door may stand open, although I continue to dig a tunnel with a teaspoon.
How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?
Homesickness is absolutely nothing, she said angrily. It is absolutely nothing. Fifty per cent of the people in the world are homesick all the time. But I don’t suppose you’re old enough to understand...
Chicken began to cry then or seemed to cry, to weep or seemed to weep, until they heard the sound of a grown man weeping, an old man who slept on a charred mattress, whose life savings in tattoos had...
And walking back from the river I remember the galling loneliness of my adolescence, from which I do not seem to have completely escaped. It is the sense of the voyeur, the lonely, lonely boy with no...
Adultery and cruelty have well-marked courses of action but what can a man do when his wife wants to appear naked on the stage?
So visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle
There was some faint coughing, a moan, and then a man spoke. Are you all right, darling? he asked. Yes, a woman said wearily. Yes, I'm all right, I guess, and then she added with great feeling, But yo...
The deep joy we take in the company of people with whom we have just recently fallen in love is undisguisable, even to a purblind waiter,
Rachel’s way was not so easy. When she lost her fat she became very pretty and quite fast. She smoked and drank and probably fornicated and the abyss that opens up before a pretty and an intemperate y...
Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long,...
I write to make sense of my life."-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey
You might have said that his look was thoughtful until you realized that he was not a thoughtful man. It was the earnest and contained look of those who are a little hard of hearing or a little stupid...