I think I should learn to get along better with people, he explained to Miss Benson one day, when she came upon him in the corridor of the literature building and asked what he was doing wearing a fra...
It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house-like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.
It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but to eviscerate them. I hated that part. Nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done. That's what I learned from my father and what I loved learning...
It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twe...
In school we chanted, along with our teacher, I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul, and meanwhile, within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been launched by one of my privat...
In a burst of calculated sincerity—miscalculated sincerity, it turns out—I tell one of the girls how the sight of her breasts pressing against her arms had led me to wish I were those arms. And is thi...
If the weather isn't bad and it's a clear night, I spend fifteen or twenty minutes before bedtime out on the deck looking skyward, or, using a flashlight, I pick my way along the dirt road to the open...
I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence....
I can lie about my name, I can lie about my school, but how am I going to lie about this fucking nose? You seem like a very nice person Mr. Porte-Noir, but why do you go around covering the middle of...
I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE IT UP TO A CHILD TO DECIDE TO EAT JESUS. I HAVE THE HIGHEST RESPECT FOR WHATEVER YOU DO, BUT MY GRANDCHILD IS NOT GOING TO EAT JESUS. I’M SORRY. THAT IS OUT OF THE QUESTION. HERE...
How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination. Though
His nose was his most distinctive feature: curved like a scimitar at the top but bent flat at the tip, and with the bone of the bridge cut like a diamond--in short, a nose out of a folktale, the sort...
His mother had died at eighty, his father at ninety. Aloud he said to them,I'm seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one. Good. You lived, his mother replied, and his father said, Look back and atone for w...
Gone were the days when Zuckerman had only to worry about Zuckerman making money: henceforth he would have to worry about his money making money.
Come se nel cuore della natura di uno scrittore ci fosse la purezza. Il cielo aiuti un simile scrittore! Come se Joyce non avesse annusato oscenamente le mutande di Nora. Come se nell’anima di Dostoev...
Can anyone be utterly without thoughtfulness? The answer is yes.
But by the third year he had come to wonder whether Laura's purpose wasn't the shield behind which he was still hiding his own, even from himself.
Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows… How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregulari...
And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking...
The Jewish man with parents still alive is a fifteen-year-old boy and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die.