And at the table next to her was a little boy in a soccer uniform sitting with his mother who told him, A wave of happiness came over me. It felt giddy to be part of it all. To be drinking a cup of c...
As a rule of thumb, whenever there appears a plural, correct for a singular. Should I ever let slip a royal WE, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head.
. . to survive the dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain thing about myself . . . I simply came to believe that one, factual circumstances of my life were almost accid...
Nicole KraussOnce upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering. Nicole Krauss, The History of Lovetags: love 8241 likes
You know, sometimes I get the feeling that we're just a bunch of habits, she said. The gestures we repeat over and over, they're just our need to be recognized. Her eyes were fixed on the TV, as if sh...
Who's that woman? Samson asked, sitting in the chair the doctor motioned to. Who?In the hall, like she's possessed.Marietta? She has Tourette's, a very severe case. It makes her tic like that. She has...
When we went into the ocean, I watched his body as he dove into the waves, and it gave me a feeling in my stomach that wasn't an ache but something different.
When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where s...
What I lost is, in the grand scope of things, almost... negligible. It's true that there's grief: it wakes me in a cold sweat thinking,, Who was I? What did I care about? What did I find funny sad, st...
We move through the day like two hands of a clock: sometimes we overlap for a moment, then come apart again, carrying on alone. Everyday exactly the same: the tea, the burnt toast, the crumbs, the sil...
There's a hurried intensity in the strokes--you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It's as if he knew there wasn't much time left. And yet, there's a serenity in...
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...
That was the end of my search to find someone that would make my mother happy again. I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I–he–none of us–would ever be able to win over the...
That he liked to think of himself as a philosopher. That he questioned all things, even the most simple, to the extent that when someone passing him on the street raised his hat and said, 'Good day,'...
Tell me, was I the sort of person who took your elbow when cars passed on the street, touched your cheek while you talked, combed your wet hair, stopped by the side of the road in the country to point...
Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement. Som...
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...
Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wro...
Only after they charged him with the crime of silence did Babel discover how many kinds of silences existed. When he heard music he no longer listened to the notes, but the silences in between. When h...