It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, in moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own...
I was the shadow of the waxwing slainBy the false azure in the windowpane;I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and ILived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
I was crazy about goal keeping. In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art had been always surrounded with a halo of singular glamour. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed...
I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me.
I am here through an error—not in this prison, specifically—but in this whole terrible, striped world;
From beyond the shining corrugations of the ocean I salute here brave Bretwit! Let there appear for a moment his hand and mine firmly clasping each other across the water over the golden wake of an em...
Death, he had said on another occasion, seems to be merely a bad habit, which nature is at present powerless to overcome.
But that mimosa grove-the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-until...
But even during this sleep—still, still—his real life showed through too much.
Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian and French—than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the wor...
Because you took advantage of a sinnerBecause you took advantageBecause you tookbecause you took advantage of my disadvantage
Any future is unknown – but sometimes it acquires a particular fogginess, as if some other force had come to the aid of destiny's natural reticence and distributed this resilient fog, from which thoug...
Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? Is that a crime? I countered, and they all laughe...
And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said t...
Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the fou...
Actually she was at least in her late twenties (I never established her exact age for even her passport lied) and had mislaid her virginity under circumstances that changed with her reminiscent moods.
El veneno estaba en la herida y la herida permaneció siempre abierta
Another part of the ritual was to ascend with closed eyes. 'Step, step, step,' came my mother's voice as she led me up - and sure enough, the surface of the next tread would receive the blind child's...
All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.
. . and in the end the logical thing would be to give up and I would give up if I were laboring for a reader today, but as there is in the world not a single human who can speak my language; or, more...