The liar looks up toward it, hoping against hope that the voices in his head have told him the truth.
People here snarl and frown a lot, he wrote; he had seen neither a smile nor the sun in months. What is life without beauty, love, and justice?
Hi,” she said, in a whispery voice, and nodded as if to confirm that she really meant it.
If you find yourself asking: How did I get here? Isador once said, that probably means you are living a life worth living.
If you wait long enough, something will happen – there has never been a time when nothing happened.
The detectives ransack the place with the passion of soldiers fighting a just war.
Shiny teeth were footnote to her smile.
You have to create a form from the life that exists, not the other way around. If it comes out in these little pieces, that’s what it is.
Death comes and takes you away and there is nothing you can do.
You’ve never been married, so you don’t know, but it is a fragile thing. Nothing ever goes away, everything stays inside it. It is a different reality.
One person’s garbage is another person’s commodity.
I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.
The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.
I do believe – and I know I shouldn’t – that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you’re not clinging to the notion of nobility.
Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.
I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.
I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn’t like losing at all.
Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.
There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out – what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.
We knew – but didn’t want to know – what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.