A woman once of some height, she is bent small, and the lingering strands of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totter...
Hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.
She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ...
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
Be what you are. Don’t try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself.
With his white collar he forges god’s name on every word he speaks
While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the centre and let life come to him — so much of it, evidently, that he could not k...
When I was in power, I found that experts can’t be trusted. For this simple reason: unlike tyrants, they are under no delusion that a country, a people is their body. Under this delusion a tyrant take...
What is this? He has a sensation of touching glass. He doesn't know if they are talking about nothing or making code for the deepest meanings.
Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.
There was a time—the year after leaving, even five years after when this homely street, with its old-fashioned high crown, its sidewalk blocks tugged up and down by maple roots, its retaining walls of...
Men traveling alone develop a romantic vertigo. Bech had already fallen in love with a freckled embassy wife in Russia, a buck-toothed chanteuse in Rumania, a stolid Mongolian sculptress in Kazakhstan...
He had mistaken the two of them for one and entrusted to her this ghost of his alone. A mistake married people make.
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke.
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in th...
Жизнь — ад, но этот ад прекрасен.
Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.