Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at.
There’s a word a friend of mine coined for that feeble gesture we make as if we’re going to hold the door, when in reality we’ve got no intention of it. He calls it “to elefain.
Harvard Square could feel like a party on a warm night, full of energy and privilege and promise. Or it could seem like one of the bleakest places on earth – an icy, windswept rat maze where kids wasted their youth clawing over one another in a fatuous contest for credentials.
How was it that he could remember not remembering, and yet the fugitive facts themselves remained so elusive? How could he misplace the skills of a lifetime? Where did such knowledge go?
Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only.
The heat of late afternoon closed in around us like an animate thing; you could feel it on your skin, warm and moist, like a great beast panting. The air was so dense it seemed to require a huge effort even to inhale it. It lay thick in the lungs and seemed to give no refreshment. Pg 163.
How often it is that an idea that seems bright bossed and gleaming in its clarity when examined in a church, or argued over with a friend in a frosty garden, becomes clouded and murk-stained when dragged out into the field of actual endeavor. pg. 65.
Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral.
I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try and do the good of which our hands are capable for all the people who come in our way...
There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.
She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.
It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another’s shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.
Who is the brave man – he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.
I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.
We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don’t have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.
I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled.
Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.
If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.
If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.
And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.