There were books everywhere. There were pens, and a blue glass vase, an ash tray from the Dolder Grand in Zürich, the rusted arrow of a weather vane, a little brass hourglass, sand dollars on the wind...
The third movement is one of the most moving passages ever written, and I've never listened to it without feeling as if I alone have been lifted up on the shoulders of some giant creature touring the...
The power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If ne...
She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them. But often I did - with time I learn...
Once my father told me: When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end.Darkness fell. Rain fell.I never asked: What question?And now it's too late. Because I lost you, Tateh. One day, i...
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...
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?
I like to think the world wasn't ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn't ready for the world. I've always arrived too late for my life.
I filled the sink with soapy water and washed the dirty pots. And with each pot and pan, and spoon I put away,I also put away a thought I couldn't bear until my kitchen and my mind returned to a state...
How you fall in love and it’s there that the work begins: day after day, year after year, you must dig yourself up, exhume the contents of your mind and soul for the other to sift through so that you...
Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand, and the next thing...
For Chanukah I asked for a sleeping bag. The one of my mother got me had pink hearts on it, was made of flannel, and would keep me alive for about five seconds in subzero temperatures before I died of...
Daniel was twenty-three, a year younger than I was, and though he hadn’t yet published a book of poems he seemed to have spent his time better, or more imaginatively, or maybe what could be said is th...
Childhood is a process of slowly recomposing oneself out of the borrowed materials of the world.
Cand te tii cu cineva de mana, de pilda, e un mod de a-ti aduce aminte cum e cand nu spuneti nimic impreuna. Si noaptea, cand e prea intuneric ca sa mai vedem ceva, simtim nevoia sa gesticulam cu ajut...
Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form
Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don't need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it's there that the work beg...
At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same. (9)
At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.
And then I thought: Perhaps that is what it means to be a father—to teach your child to live without you.