My dear Mrs. Ali, I would hardly refer to you as old," he said. "You are in what I would call the very prime flowering of mature womanhood." It was a little grandiose but he hoped to surprise a blush. Instead she laughed out loud at him. "I have neve...
I have produced no children of my own and my husband is dead," she replied, an acid tone in her voice. "Thus I am more to be pitied than revered. I am expected to give up the shop to my nephew, who will then be able to afford to bring a very good wif...
...I tell myself it does not matter what one reads--favorite authors, particular themes--as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books.
He had never imagined so clearly the consequences of mailing a letter--the impossibility of retrieving it from the iron mouth of the box; the inevitability if its steady progress through the postal system; the passing from bag to bag and postman to p...
He cursed himself for having assumed the weather would be sunny. Perhaps it was the result of evolution, he thought--some adaptive gene that allowed the English to go on making blithe outdoor plans in the face of almost certain rain.
Look here, it's all very tidy and convenient to see the world in black and white,' said the Major, trying to soften his tone slightly. 'It's a particular passion of young men eager to sweep away their dusty elders.' He stopped to organize his thought...
You Anglo-Saxons have largely broken away from such dependence on family. Each generation feels perfectly free to act alone and you are not afraid.
We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors.
I miss being a student," said Abdul Wahid. "I miss the passionate discussions with my friends, and most of all the hours among the books.
Despite his attempts to maintain a vigorous structure of errands, golf games, visits, and meetings, there were sometimes days like this one, filled with rain and touched with a gnawing sense of parts missing from life. When the slick mud ran in the f...
Only sometimes when we pick and choose among the rules we discover later that we have set aside something precious in the process.
...as I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy.
But it's not enough to be in love. It's about how you spend your days, what you do together, who you choose as friends, and most of all it's what work you do ... Better to break both our hearts now than watch them wither away over time.
He opened his mouth to say that she looked extremely beautiful and deserved armfuls of roses, but the words were lost in committee somewhere, shuffled aside by the parts of his head that worked full-time at avoiding ridicule.
The human race is all the same when it comes to romantic relations,' said the Major. 'A startling absence of impulse control combined with complete myopia.
You are a wise man, Major, and I will consider your advice with great care--and humility." He finished his tea and rose from the table to go to his room. "But I must ask you, do you really understand what it means to be in love with an unsuitable wom...
At our age, surely there are better things to sustain us, to sustain a marriage, than the brief flame of passion?" ..."You are mistaken, Ernest," she said at last. "There is only the passionate spark. Without it, two people living together may be lon...
Memories were like tomb paintings, thought the Major, the colors still vivid no matter how many layers of mud and sand time deposited. Scrape at them and they come up all red and blazing.
