At the time that he had seriously begun to consolidate his organization, Parker was working in a custom photo lab. The reader who is not much taken by audiovisual pastimes may have a deficient picture...
Each bullet not a moment but a moment's end...
As he walked up past the red and green tennis courts in east Berkeley and saw the swing of the women's hair in the breeze, the crisp strokes that sent the ball over the net like a little bone-white pl...
So even that doesn’t make you happy? What about your Seventh Symphony? At least it rallied people. Once you told me how alive you felt then; you said you gave it your all— Didn’t you learn in school,...
Perhaps the sallow drunk should have taken the hint. But he needed to feel confident in his life. It was only when he drank that he felt he could be anything. He felt this precisely because his percep...
For we all must build our worlds around us, bravely or dreamily, as long as we can we shelter ourselves from the rain, walling ourselves in gorgeously.
Best listened to in a windowless room, better than best in an airless room—correctly speaking, a bunker sealed forever and enwrapped in tree-roots—the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110)...
Before [Hitler] slammed the door behind him, he needed there to be nothing left, not even the door itself.
As surely as the town of Rochelle is Protestant I can see you now becoming impatient. The covers of my book are between your relentless palms. A single hint of insolence on this page, the faintest shi...
All that's happened is inconsequential; it cannot hurt us anymore; there's only music, which lives within us and beyond us, needing us to express it but capable of surviving forever between expression...
After all, one of life’s best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves:
A treble clef, for example, resembles a Muscovite or Leningrader in a bulky hooded parka. A bass clef bends as simply and painfully as a silhouetted widow in Leningrad drawing water from the whiteness...
After all, one of life’s best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now
But in 1917 we had no cares except the mundane ones of starvation and occupation and civil war, and for those of us in our armored trains traveling up and down the front waging brilliant campaigns, or...