It's strange what the heart can do when the mind is giving the directions.
Later - when things happened that they could never have imagined - she wrote him a letter that said: When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?
Narrative cannot sustain formlessness any more than light can sustain darkness - it is the antithesis of formlessness, and so it can never truly communicate it. Chaos is the one truth that narrative m...
No, what I felt was the torment of waiting, stuck between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next which might or might not bring a hail storm, plane crash, poetic justice, or a miraculou...
Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the one thing that struck me most about life is the capacity for change. One day you're a person and the next day they tell you you're a dog. At first it's...
Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath. At the topof his lungs, he shrieked: I! HAVE NOT! BEEN! UNHAPPY! MY WHOLE! LIFE! Butyou’re only seven, I said.
One day she marched around the side of the house and confronted me. I've seen you out there every day for the past week, and everyone knows you stare at me all day in school, if you have something you...
Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violen...
Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. It wasn't easy. I found out how little is unbearable.
Sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while...
Sometimes, reading to my children at night, the perverse thought would come to me that in rehashing for them the same fairy stories, Bible stories, and myths, I was not giving them a gift but rather t...
Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently...
Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined the two thousand copies of The History of Love as a flock of two thousand homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many...
THE DEATH OF LEOPOLD GURSKYLeopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920.He died learning to walk.He died standing at the blackboard.And once, also, carrying a heavy tray.He died practicing a new wa...
The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that...
The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment,...
The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life - a pot, a chair, a lamp - threatened to be the thing that sent me t...
The more I've learned in my life, the more acutely I've felt my hunger and blindness, and at the same time the closer I've felt to the end of hunger, the end of blindness. At times I've felt myself to...
The truth is the thing I invented so that I could survive.
The truth was I'd given up waiting long ago. The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces. Or better to say, in face. Grammar of my l...
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