The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so lon...
I want to say somewhere: I've tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction...
He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.
Era uma vez um rapaz. Vivia numa aldeia que já não existe, numa casa que já não existe, na orla de um campo que já não existe, lugar de todas as descobertas e onde tudo era possível. Um pau podia ser...
I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference.
I danced the only way I knew how to dance: for life, crashing into the chairs, and spinning until I fell, so that I could get up and dance again, until dawn broke and found my prostrate on the floor,...
He had slept next to her for thirty-six years, and the mattress felt different without her weight, however slight, and without the rhythm of her breath the dark had no measure. There were times he wok...
All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.
When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn't control what came through it.
The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
Put even a fool in front of the window and you'll get a Spinoza; in the end life makes window watchers of us all
Looking at his reflection in the dark window, Litvinoff believed something had been peeled away and a truth revealed to him: He was an average man. A man willing to accept things as they were, and, be...
HOW ANGELS SLEEP. Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the living. They know so little about what it's like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the wo...
We take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.
The woman who later became his wife was sleeping in his bed, her face buried in the pillows and her feet crossed on top of each other like a child's. He watched her sleep and struggled to see her as s...
The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma.Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt...
So many words get lost. They leave the mough and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past: Iw...
I've reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, afer all,...
The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed, or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was i...