Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
If I had a camera,’ I said, ‘I’d take a picture of you every day. That way I’d remember how you looked every single day of your life.
That’s what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I’m not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.
All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.
When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit
In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.
When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it.
Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.
There were many things they simply didn’t talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.
Family! So sorry, forgive me. I thought I’d met all the mispocheh!
So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves.
Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.
She abandoned the garden, and the mums and asters that had trusted her to see them through to the first frost hung their waterlogged heads.
But how can one regret what, to the mind, has never existed? Even loss is an inaccurate description, for what loss is without the awareness of losing?
there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.
She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them.
The kiss stayed there with no place to go, no sensory reserve that could absorb it and file it away as a common act of intimacy, a thousand times received. He knew what Anna was asking: whether you could love someone without habits.
When you’re young, you think it’s going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close-as close as you can get-to another person only makes it clear the impassable distance between you.
The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
I’ve reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.
Having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions.
The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.
I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)
HE LIKED TO COOK AND LAUGH AND SING, COULD START A FIRE WITH HIS HANDS, FIX THINGS THAT WERE BROKEN, AND EXPLAIN HOW TO LAUNCH THINGS INTO SPACE, BUT HE DIED WITHIN NINE MONTHS
Sometimes I get the feeling that we’re just a bunch of habits. The gestures we repeat over and over, they’re just our need to be recognized. Without them, we’d be unidentifiable. We have to reinvent ourselves every minute.
Maybe Grodzenski was showing me, with his quiet pride, the reason he hummed a little while he worked.
Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
…after all, who isn’t a survivor from the wreck of childhood?
It’s one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.
When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?
…larger than life…I’ve never understood that expression. What’s larger than life?
. . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he’d be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] – to teach your child to live without you.
I tried to make sense of things. Now that I think about it, I have always tried. It could be my epitaph. LEO GURSKY: HE TRIED TO MAKE SENSE.
To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can’t imagine what that’s like.