I thought, it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I’d had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.
Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.
I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others – The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.
The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.
They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her.
In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.
I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.
I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.
I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn’t recognize it. It’s not that I didn’t trust him, becuase I did. It’s that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don’t know how I could have tried harder.
Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.
But I dig Negroes. I dig them all the way.
Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.
It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?
There is nothing wrong with compromising. Even if you compromise almost everything.
Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.
Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.
The animals are those things that God likes but doesn’t love.
I could not believe in a God that would challenge faith like this.
The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.