Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!
No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.
My dear son, It is a puzzle worthy of the best psychiatrist that a human life can be so utterly void and at the same time filled to bursting with
Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank—but that’s not the same thing. —Joseph Conrad
I don’t save lives, Zelikman said. I just prolong their futility.
His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.
Here its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect.
He had yet to fall in love to the degree that he felt he was capable of falling, had never written villanelles or declaration veiled in careful metaphor, nor sold his blood plasma to buy champagne or...
Although it was only nine o’clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he’d strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his comp...
A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowers's face.
Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children's understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make.The Killer Hook
The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness
— Они были дети, — сказал немецкий офицер. — А мы были волки.
— «Забудь о том, откуда ты совершаешь эскейп, — сказал Йозеф, цитируя старую сентенцию Корнблюма. — Тревожься только о том куда».
Wild discipline by a dozen red-shirted men. The remaining half of the black-armored Arsiyah dismounted to confront the barred gate. They could not know, as Zelikman saw plainly from the top of the ris...
Adventures befall the unadventuresome as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold.
We can’t take pleasure in a work of art, not in good conscience, without accepting the implicit intention of the artist to please us.
Titus, operating under the terms of the more modest package that he had negotiated with Gwen, which included room, board, and at the end of his own Candy Land path, the ambiguous pink-frosting-roofed...
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...
The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality.