The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
The awfulness of love and violets
The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I fel...
The crickets kept crepitating; from time to time there came a sweet whiff of burning juniper; and above the black alpestrine steppe, above the silken sea, the enormous, all-engulfing sky, dove-gray wi...
On Translating Eugene Onegin 1What is translation? On a platterA poet's pale and glaring head,A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,And profanation of the dead.The parasites you were so hard onAre pa...
I tore apart the fantasies of Poe, And dealt with childhood memories of strange Nacreous gleams beyond the adults’ range.
I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.
A late arrival had the impression of lots of loud people unnecessarily grouped within a smoke-blue space between two mirrors gorged with reflections. Because, I suppose, Cynthia wished to be the young...
Beyond observing that some law of logic should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new truth (Tell...
All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.
Qui veut être assassin, de nos jours, doit être un homme de science. Non, non, je n'étais ni l'un ni l'autre. Mesdames et messieurs les jurés, la majorité des pervers sexuels qui brûlent d'avoir avec...
I had possessed her - and she never knew it.
And perhaps it was precisely because she knew nothing at all about chess that chess for her was not simply a parlor game or a pleasant pastime, but a mysterious art equal to all the recognized arts. S...
And a beautiful garden, not far from a beautiful lake, and I said it sounded perfectly perfect.
The satisfaction of a special Pninian craving.
There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each othe...
No you can't take a pistol and plug a girl you don't even know simply because she attracts you.
I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window.… Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
I love you, my sun, my life, I love your eyes-closed- all the little tails of your thoughts, your stretchy vowels, your whole soul from head to heels.