You are dying. No, that came out wrong. What you meant to express was the existential grief that comes with the knowledge that all things die. You are not dying, except insofar as you have always been dying.
To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt.
He hasn’t said more than two words to anyone in the six weeks since he was injured. He’s been in terrible pain, and he’ll probably have to be in and out of the hospital for a very long time. It was a big deal that he talked to you.
A second later, he put on his Breton cap.
Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met – he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty.
Sam is holding one of your hands, and Sadie is holding the other. And your parents are there, but they are standing behind your friends. And this makes sense, because Sadie and Sam have been your family, as much as your family has been your family. Behind them, a thousand paper cranes festoon the room. “It’s okay, Marx,” Sadie says. “You can let go.
She almost seemed to be an extension of him, and he, of her.
Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile. She expressed some of this to Marx at the office, and he laughed at her. “I’m afraid I’ve given you the wrong impression, Sadie,” he said. “I rather like to be consumed.
And in the end, she had decided she preferred being his creative partner to being his lover. There were so many people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people who could move you creatively.
Ludo means ‘game’ in Latin.
They say it’s all in my head.” Marx thought about this. “But what pain isn’t?
She felt, perhaps, old. She was still only twenty-five, but until that point, she had always been the youngest in any room she’d been in, and she had derived power from that.
My books can be divided into dog eras. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was begun in the era of Edie and Frank and completed in the era of Leia and Frank. Good dogs, all.
A man puts on a suit and a tie and an American flag pin, and that’s the end of the story. He is a politician. A female politician’s appearance is always a disputed territory, a matter of discussion.
It’s like Oz and Kansas, if Dorothy could switch between them the whole time.
He would know her handwriting anywhere.
We had so much freedom – creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves. What we had was our impossibly high standards, and your completely theoretical conviction that we could make a great game.
I love you, Sadie,” Sam said. “I know, Sam. I love you, too.
It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.
Then there are the books I teach every year: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Johnny Got His Gun, A Farewell to Arms, A Prayer for Owen Meany, some years Wuthering Heights, Silas Marner, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or I Capture the Castle. Those books are like old friends.