It reassured me that, if nothing else in life, at least I’d fulfilled my earliest ambition simply to wander far afield, in spirit if not in space, from the place of my birth.
In order to destroy the world, it becomes necessary to save it.
I wasn't unkind to him. I just didn't talk to him. I didn't talk to anybody, and I didn't want anybody talking to me. That was the plan.
I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction.
I thought, I fanced, that in a moment, I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has.
I said, I need to hear something that’s going to save my life.Re: Selecting songs from a jukebox.
I do my writing in the morning, now, if the boy will let me, and in the afternoon when I’m not teaching, and sometimes in the evening when I get home from the Alibi Tavern.
He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like How sane are we? and Do our lives have meaning? The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.
Gibson Goode to Archy: You're just being stubborn now. Stubbornness in the service of a mistaken notion is a vanity and a sin.
Bird of Wide Experience I
As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the p...
Те, кто зарабатывает себе на жизнь, играя с катастрофой, развивают в себе способность пессимистического воображения, что зачастую почти неотличимо от проницательности.
Writers—like insomniacs—are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when...
There had been times in the past when my sister-in-law’s counsel, while never useful, had provided a certain amount of welcome bemusement, like the advice of an oracular hen.
Male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glo...
You have to look at Jews like Bina Gelbfish, to explain the wide range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at th...
The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering...
The daily sight of her is going to be a torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.
That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather’s view: to render memory unnecessary.
Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect.