I felt instinctively that toilets - as also telephones - happened to be for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects - it may be a recurr...
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...
Беше тъмно; киша и безнадеждност. Фаровете ми бяха надвиснали над широка канавка, пълна с вода. Околността, ако имаше такава, се свеждаше до черна пустиня. Мъчих се да се измъкна, обаче задните ми кол...
A person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
[...] leaving for a day or two that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is: a distant lone tree against golden heavens; ripples of light on the inner curve of a bridge; a thing impossibl...
When stripped and shiny in the mist of the bath house, his bold virilia contrasted harshly with his girlish grace. He was a regular faunlet.
There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies—a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk...
The summer night was starless and stirless, with distant spasms of silent lightning.
The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I...
The answer to all questions of life and death, the absolute solution was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveller realising that the wild country he surveys is not an accidenta...
Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the fu...
Paduk and all the rest wrote on steadily, but Krug's failure was complete, a baffling and hideous disaster, for he had been busy becoming an elderly man instead of learning the simple but now unobtain...
Nothing happened--or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or gr...
My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs. Whenever I’d permit, Or, with a silent shiver, order it, Whatever in my field of vision dwelt – An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte Stil...
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plai...
If told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary.
If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece. Line