There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook.
I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn’t greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.
Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal?
Too many words for one book–truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.
Kolya was a braggart, a know-it-all, a Jew-baiting Cossack, but his confidence was so pure and complete it no longer seemed like arrogance, just the mark of a man who had accepted his own heroic destiny.
She was not a writer herself but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments.
He gave me a small, secretive smile, a smile that said he knew many things but couldn’t share them all at once.
She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. He mouth was cold, her lips rough from the winter wind, and if the mystics are right and we are doomed to repeat our squalid lives ad infinitum, at least I will always return to that kiss
I’ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.
It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.
So many die without our caring, decline to silence in rooms beyond hearing. We honor the dead and abhor the dying.- from the story “De Composition
Don’t worry, my friend. I won’t let you die.” I was seventeen and stupid and I believed him.