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.
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...
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
Be what you are. Don’t try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself.
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...
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
I Missed His Book, But I Read His NameThough authors are a dreadful clanTo be avoided if you can,I'd like to meet the Indian,M. Anantanarayanan.I picture him as short and tan.We'd meet, perhaps, in Hi...
He had mistaken the two of them for one and entrusted to her this ghost of his alone. A mistake married people make.
Beyond doubt, I am a splendid fellow. In the autumn, winter and spring, I execute the duties of a student of divinity; in the summer I disguise myself in my skin and become a lifeguard. My slightly na...
All this saving a child does! At one point I even saved the box scores of an entire baseball season, both leagues, since Philadelphia played, haplessly, in both. How precious each scrap of the world a...
A woman’s beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in th...
The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.
It was somehow wonderful of her to be, in every detail, herself.
The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father’s opinions and even into those of our grandfathers.
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he frequently found on the floor when he lived boyishly close to the carpet.
He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?
He accelerates. The growing complexity of lights threatens him. He is being drawn into Philadelphia. He hates Philadelphia. Dirtiest city in the world, they live on poisoned water, you can taste the c...
Geography! That’s something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography.
Evening Concert, Sainte-Chapelle The celebrated windows flamed with lightdirectly pouring north across the Seine;we rustled into place. Then violinsvaunting Vivaldi's strident strength, then Brahms,se...