And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.
I had the elated, otherworldly feeling I sometimes get entering the sphere of another's life, when for a moment changing my banal habits and living like seems entirely possible, a feeling that always...
. . she gave him one of those broad smiles she reserved for strangers, as if she were aware of being able to pass, in their eyes, for an ordinary woman.
When I was young, I thought that I would live my life as freely as the writers and artists I took as my heroes. But in the end I wasn’t brave enough to resist the current pulling me toward convention.
To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence....
There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn't lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discree...
There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes things worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.
The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we might never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us--we couldn't use them in the same way and s...
The truth is that she told me she couldn't love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet.I made myself forget. I don't know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.
Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say 'Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I've always been right to love you.' Because...
Once 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. When they were ten he asked her to marry him. When they were eleven he ki...
Mom? I said. She turned. Can I talk to you about something? Of course, darling. Come here.I took a few steps into the room. There was so much I wanted to say. I need you to be -- I said, and then I st...
I wished to punish her for her intolerable stoicism, which made it impossible for me to ever be truly needed by her in the most profound ways a person can need another, a need that often goes by the n...
I was never a man of great ambitionI cried too easilyI didn't have a head for scienceWords often failed meWhile others prayed I only moved my lips
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 memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, beca...
For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to be...
During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile. For some it was a hand, for others a femur, yet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass....
And yet isn’t it true of all of us? That there are things we feel to be at the heart of our nature that are not borne out by the evidence around us, and so, to protect our delicate sense of integrity,...
27. Một việc tôi sẽ không bao giờ làm khi lớn lênĐó là yêu, bỏ học đại học, học cách sống bằng nước và không khí, có một loài đặt theo tên mình, huỷ hoại cuộc sống của mình. Khi tôi còn nhỏ, mẹ thường...
When I woke again, it was into a homesickness that felt physical, as its symptoms had been physical for seventeenth-century mercenary soldiers who'd fallen ill from being so far from home, the first t...