The sloshing of their hooves in the paddy field that I heard thirty yards away, my car door open for the breeze, the haunting sound I was caught within as if creatures of magnificence were undressing and removing their wings.
We are all the people we have ever known. We carry them for the rest of our lives, across every border we cross.
Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel!
Who realizes how contented feral children are? The grasp of the family fell away as soon as I was out the door.
He spends hours with the Englishman, who reminds him of a fir tree he saw in England, its one sick branch, too weighted down with age, held up by a crutch made out of another tree. It stood in Lord Suffolk’s garden on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the Bristol Channel like a sentinel. In spite of such infirmity he sensed the creature within it was noble, with a memory whose power rainbowed beyond ailment.
He rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper.
She could not forget the depth of her sleep, the lightness of her plummet.
There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult. There was some little waltz in the way he spoke to her and the way he thought.
It is a strange time, the end of a war.” “Yes. A period of adjustment.
I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn’t speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said, ‘Faya!’ That was a good day.
Despair young and never look back,” an Irishman said. And this is what I did.
The trouble with ideology, Alice, is that it hates the private. You must make it human.
The Germans evacuated Naples on October 1, 1943. During an Allied raid the previous September, hundreds of citizens had walked away and begun living in the caves outside the city. The Germans in their retreat bombed the entrance to the caves, forcing the citizens to stay underground. A typhus epidemic broke out. In the harbour scuttled ships were freshly mined underwater.
Ora li amava, questi libri rilegati con i dorsi all’italiana, i frontespizi, le illustrazioni ad acquerello, le copertine telate, amava il loro odore, perfino i loro scricchiolii quando li apriva in fetta, quasi si rompesse una serie di minuscole ossa invisibili.
This history of mine,′ Herodotus says, ‘has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.’ What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history – how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love...
Welcome to my neck of the woods. I love that phrase. As if it were part of a body.
Poliziano translated Homer. He wrote a great poem on Simonetta Vespucci, you know her?
The mole’s tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels, The lark’s eggs scattered, their owners fled; And the hedgehog’s household the sapper unseals. The snail draws in at the terrible tread, But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim. The worm asks what can be overhead, And wriggles deep from a scene so grim, And guesses him safe.
She was unaware, in fact, how close she was to The Darter, who was hiding in my room, reading the Beano.
As if one of those love potions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream had been applied, only what you first saw on waking was not a love object but a source of fear, the source of a pummelling you had been through minutes before.