Except for when I was very little and thought that being an engineer meant he drove a train. Then I imagined him in the seat of an engine car the color of coal, a string of shiny passenger cars traili...
But we didn’t invent the idea of a single God; we only wrote a story of our struggle to remain true to Him and in doing so we invented ourselves. We gave ourselves a past and inscribed ourselves into...
Bruno, my old faithful. I haven't sufficiently described him. Is it enough to say he is indescribable? No. Better to try and fail than not to try at all.
A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter...
The tender brutality of physical existence...the insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self-reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts...
. . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child...
Left to my own devices, I'm content to wake myself with a fart.
Who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness?
When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.
There's no match for the silence of GOD.
There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.
The way Misha tells it, he drove like a blind man, giving the car almost full independence to feel its way along, bumping off things, only giving the wheel a spin with the tips of this fingers when th...
The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.
The moment had passed, the door between the lives we could have led and the lives we led had shut in our faces.
She was gone, and all that was left was the space you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again...
Sentir en las piernas las vibraciones de su voz, es percibir la realidad en toda su extensión
Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought. Look at me.
Over and over, I read the pages of the book I'd written as a young man. It was so long ago. I was naïve. A twenty-year-old in love. A swollen heart and I had to match. I thought I could do anything. S...
One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn’t, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was...
Once, coming out of the cool, dark lab into the heat of the desert sun, he'd briefly wondered if the emptiness he'd been so staunchly guarding was, not the absence of memory, but actually a memory its...