A smile of remembrance of lost times.
They moved in dance steps too intricate for the noninitiated eye to imitate or understand. Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath, but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism.
Some have ideas. You know how old chickens scratch and gabble. That’s how the tales started, all the gossip, the wondering, all the things people said without knowing and then believed, since they heard it with their own ears, from their own lips, each word.
The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history.
I imagined myself in some way defined by my relation to another creature.
Very little is needed to make a happy life, he said.
My father had bought an ugly new clock, and it was ticking again in the quiet kitchen.
Albertine was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself.