we wept within the moment that was dividing our life into before and after, whereby the before was forever foreclosed, while the after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle-star, into a dark universe of pain.
The cafeteria in the Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world—and forever it shall be—with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped away from suffering c...
If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.
Then everyone would retreat for a nap, after which we would have coffee and cake, sometimes an argument.
One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.
And the world around me was nothing if not an infinity of distractions: cute girls, novels and comic books, my budding record collection, neighborhood boys whistling from the playground under my window, beckoning me to a soccer game.
-the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding h...
It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.
Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.
One of the most common platitudes we heard was that “words failed.” But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the horror of what w...
The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.
While he wanted to teach me what he knew, I wanted him to see what it all looked like for me—perhaps love is a process of finding a common vision of reality.
-not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of wo...
Isabel’s indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.
I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.
Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative ima...
