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...
C'era una volta un ragazzo che amava una ragazza, e la sua risata era una domanda a cui lui avrebbe voluto rispondere per il resto della sua vita.
You hear a sound and it's truth turning in its grave.
You fall in love, it's intoxicating, an for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again. Only it does...
Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
When people spoke to him, he heard less and less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences, which is like solving a toug...
When my sons asked the reason for my trip, I said that I needed to conduct research for my book. What is it about? the younger one asked. He was constantly writing stories, as many as three a day, and...
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.
There was a shop on Lexingon that advertised passport pictures. I like to go sometimes. I keep them in a little album. Mostly they're of me, except for one, which ia of Isaac, aged five, and another o...
There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matter worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.
The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it-just to name it-must have been like trying to catch something invisible.
The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.
Staring out the window, Litvinoff imagined the two thousand copies of The History of Love as a flock of two thousand homing pigeons that could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many...
Somewhere in the far north of Canada there wuld be snow, falling soundlessly overy the Beaufort Sea, falling over the Artic without a soul to see it. What kind of weather was that, Samson wondered, an...
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...
One is always in the hold of the world, but one doesn't physically feel it's hold, doesn't account for its effect. Cannot draw comfort from the hold of the world, which registers only as a neutral emp...
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...
Once upon a time a boy loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
Just as there was a first instant when someone rubbed two sticks together to make a spark, there was a first time joy was felt, and a first time for sadness. For a while, new feelings were being inven...
If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms 0 if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them,...