Fue siendo alumno de este hombre cuando empecé a preguntarme si los literatos no sufren alguna variedad de desequilibrio mental, desequilibrio que, pensando en el trepidante balanceo nocturno de Alber...
Fatherhood impose[s] an obligation that [is] more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitmen...
Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.
Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mix of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, oth...
Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.
Days go by, and I don't remember not to forget..
But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.
Because you know, truth is, I don’t give a shit about some scratched-up vinyl Rahsaan Kirk, Ornette Coleman sound-like-a-goose-trying-to-fuck-a-bicycle bootleg pressing from the rare Paris concert of...
Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it seemed, through the shame and ruination of exposure. Sammy could not have known that one day he would come to regard all the things that...
At the end of every short story the reader should feel as if a cloud has been lifted from the face of the moon.
And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn't have to understand what you feel, and I don't expect it. It's enough if he understands what you just said.
And there were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers...
And in that moment he felt- for the first time that optimistic and cheerful boy allowed himself to feel- how badly made life was, how flawed. No matter how richly furnished you made it, with all the n...
Although it wasn't raining anymore, the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze.
All 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...
Alcohol as helpful to the making of scapegoats as mud to the shaping of golems.
A model of probity, a steady hand to reassure the grieving, a sober man—a grave man—solid as the pillar of a tomb. A good dose of gangster to the hat to let you know the councilman played his politics...
A laboring woman, though, while she endured her labor, lay at the center of something truly radiant in four dimensions; every birth everywhere, all the vectors of human evolution and migration origina...
A high point in a life lived at sea level, prone to flooding.
It had bred false camaraderies and drawn my attention to deep flaws and fault lines when what mattered--what matters so often in the course of everyday human life--were the surfaces and the joins.