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...
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....
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.
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...
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...
You hear a sound and it's truth turning in its grave.
Let's stand under a tree, she said. Why?Because it's nicer.Maybe you should sit on a chair, and I'll stand above you, like they always do with husbands and wives.That's stupid.Why's it stupid?Because...
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...
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.
After all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?
A place belongs to anyone who has a use for it.
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 that happened was we kissed each other, and I fou...
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,...
At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, and that when my book ended I'd end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages...
But then a foreboding thought cast a shadow over the rest, blunt and unadorned, and it was simply this: that for most of my life i had been emulating the thoughts and actions of other people. That so...
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...
Franz Kafka is Dead He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. Come down! they cried to him. Come down! Come down! Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waite...
I hadn't thought about it until just now, but the night Daniel rang our bell in the winter of 1970 was the end of November, the same time of year she died twenty-seven years later. I don't know what's...
I knew how to raise my own child, what did he think it was, a game of Scrabble or Monopoly, there are no rules, was she so blind that she couldn’t see that all that mental midget had done was turn her...
I made a point of answering the question I received with some frequency from journalists, Do you think books can change people's lives? (which really meant, Do you actually think anything you could wr...
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