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 price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
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...
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...
In the months after the relationship ends, a person can seem to grow at a lightning rate, like in a nature documentary where weeks of footage is run at high speed to show a plant unfurling in seconds,...
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,...
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...
Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and giv...
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...
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
He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.
We take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.
The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.
I found out how little is unbearable.
Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.
He went on for some time while I sat listening in silence because I knew he was right, and like two people who have loved each other however imperfectly, who have tried to make a life together, howeve...
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...
The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that always leans to the left. Only now that my son was...
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 with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone's hai...