Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature's only subjects; but if men's sta...
Maybe it’s not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and glut...
Laura po Kitty touží. Po její síle, po tom, jak věcně, pohodově přijímá všechna svá zklamání, po mihotavých růžovozlatých světlech její utajené osobnosti, po křehkých našamponovaných hlubinách jejích...
If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark. And that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. You live with the threat, yo...
He thinks with distracted affection of himself, the young Louis Waters, who spent his youth trying to live with Richard, who was variously flattered and enraged by Richard's indefatigable worship of h...
On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read t...
What’s the most fundamental human urge?Barrett recites for her. To find the perfect pair of jeans. To find the jeans that fit and flatter you so ideally that everybody, every cognizant being on the pl...
They're not tourists, either, they're nothing like the gawkers and brayers in a place like Times Square, but they don't live here, they live in Jersey or Westchester, they're burghers right out of sev...
She'd never been religious. She hadn't allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.
She is overtaken by a sensation of unbeing. There is no other word for it.
One often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence. He is not one of those egotists who miniaturize others. He is the opposite kind of egotist, driven by grandiosity rather than greed, and if he insis...
Milwaukee, Rebecca. Order and sobriety and a devotion to cleanliness that scours out the soul. Decent people doing their best to live decent lives, three's nothing really to hate them for, they do the...
It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to bel...
It's remarkable, being alive. Being, once again, someone walking through a dust of blowing snow...
It was either the wind or the spirit of the house itself, briefly unsettled by our nocturnal absence but to old to be surprised by the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we...
I liked to think you could change your life without abandoning the simple daily truths.
He demands that his mother pick him up so he can see the soldiers better; so he will be more visible to them. All this enters the bridge, resounds through its wood and stone, and enters Virginia’s bod...
Eventually, decades later, when the king was dying, the queen gently ushered everybody out into the corridor, closed the door to the royal bedchamber, and got into bed with her husband. She started si...
Do you imagine, Peter, that your Carpe Diem boots would look any less deluded to them than that guy's Tony Lamas do to you? There's a comeuppance for everyone, wherever you are, and the farther you go...
Catherine thought Simon was in the locket, and in heaven, and with them still. Lucas hoped she didn't expect him to be happy about having so many Simons to contend with.