Isn't it weird," I said, "the way you remember things, when someone's gone?" What do you mean?" I ate another piece of waffle. "When my dad first died, all I could think about was that day. It's taken me so long to be able to think back to before tha...
She’s contemplative; I can feel the air around her thick with her thoughts. “No,” she says at last, “I want to believe you’re being sincere but I know you’re not. So I say no, because even if I allow myself to fantasize a little about our...
Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazard from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first sentence I knew it wasn't the thing to read to a dying man: The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began, and common sense tells us that our existence is but ...
The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in faili...
I have these secret pangs of shame about being single, like I wasn't good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I'd told her once, about the five rules of the world as arrived at by this Catholic priest named Tom Weston. The first ru...
Towards the end of the Second World War, when I was sixteen years old, I was taken out of school and forced into the army. After a brief period of training at a base in Wüzburg, I arrived at the front, which by that time had already crossed the Rhin...
The room where they were dancing was very dark.... It was queer to be in his arms.... She had known better dancers.... He had looked ill.... Perhaps he was.... Oh, poor Valentine-Elisabeth.... What a funny position!.... The good gramophone played.......
In the past I had often tried to escape the grown-up world of sorrow through my imagination- dreaming that a handsome young lieutenant would ride to my rescue or that a great empresario would discover my musical talents and whisk me away. I had envis...
Kao što netko nakon kakva luda sna shvati da mu je krenuti u Ameriku, kao što netko nakon probdjevene noći konačno odluči oženiti djevojkom koju je još sinoć definitivno iznogirao, tako sam i ja iznenada počeo čitati. I to ne slučajno, nev...
Fabre stood up. He placed his fingertips on d‘Anton’s temples. “Put your fingers here,” he said. “Feel the resonance. Put them here, and here.” He jabbed at d’Anton’s face: below the cheekbones, at the side of his jaw. “I’ll teach...
You can’t tell half a tale, Poison. You can’t write half a book. Whatever you choose to do next will completely change the aspect of what has gone before. if you decided to suddenly kill your friends as they slept –“ Why would I do that?” P...
"Of cats' first disobedience, and the height Of that forbidden tree whose doom'd ascent Brought man into the world to help us down And made us subject to his moods and whims, For though we may have knock'd an apple loose As we were carried safely to ...
They were all fitting into place, the jig-saw pieces. The odd strained shapes that I had tried to piece together with my fumbling fingers and they had never fitted. Frank's odd manner when I spoke about Rebecca. Beatrice and her rather diffident nega...
By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to...
Have you kissed many boys before?" he asked quietly. His question brought my mind back into focus. I raised an eyebrow. "Boys? That's an assumption." Noah laughed, the sound low and husky. "Girls, then?" "No." "Not many girls? Or not many boys?" "Nei...
Gareth Miller grabbed the beer first, then the hotdog, because if there’s one thing you don’t want to be caught dead without at these sorts of events it’s beer. The hotdog was strictly for show, a prop, a way of blending in. Burst of static in ...
I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-...
This week in live current events: your eyes. All power can be dangerous: Direct or alternating, you, socket to me. Plugged in and the grid is humming, this electricity, molecule-deep desire: particular friction, a charge strong enough to stop a heart...
Maybe this is kind of cliche, but animals, well, dogs, are what I do for a living. One reason I like spending time with them so much is they seem to think people are really good. They live with us, and obey our rules, most of which make no sense to t...
—¿Que si creo en un anciano de barba blanca que vive en las nubes y juzga a los mortales con un código moral de diez mandamientos? ¡Cielo santo, querida Elly, claro que no! Me habría expulsado de esta vida hace años por mi alocada historia. ¿...
It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my m...
