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.

I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I—he—none of us—would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they...

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn’t happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration...

At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I’d end, a great wind would sweep...

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...

He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life.This particular book was one of the last of the two...

Sentir en las piernas las vibraciones de su voz, es percibir la realidad en toda su extensión

Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she...

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.

I left the library. Crossing the street, I was hit head-on by a brutal loneliness. I felt dark and hollow. Abandoned, unnoticed, forgotten, I stood on the sidewalk, a nothing, a gatherer of dust. People...

The fear of death haunted me for a year. I cried whenever anyone dropped a glass or broke a picture. But even then that passed, I was left with a sadness that couldn’t be rubbed...

I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said...

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the...

Érase una vez un niño que amaba a una niña, y la risa de ella era como una pregunta que él quería pasar la vida contestando

Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where...

I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. (245)

When you are 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 clear that impassable...

In life we sit at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.

Maybe Grodzenski was showing me, with his quiet pride, the reason he hummed a little while he worked.

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.

—Es mejor que sea un secreto. —,Por qué? —Porque así no podrán quitárnoslo”.

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. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past:...

And he isn’t crying for her, not for his grandma, he’s crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his...

It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I imagined my life could happen in another way. It’s true that early on I became used to the long hours I spent alone. I...

In the days after my heart attack & before I began to write again, all I could think about was dying. I’d been spared again, and only after the danger had passed did I allow...

To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a...

The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that always leans to the left....

At night the sky is pure astronomy.

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.

Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.

Because it hardly ends with falling in love. Just the opposite. I don’t need to tell you, Your Honor, I sense that you understand true loneliness. How you fall in love and it’s there that...

These things are lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so...

…after all, who isn’t a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the individual life in a way that expands our understanding of some previously unseen...

You fall in love, it’s intoxicating, an for a little while you feel like you’ve actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you’ll never be lonely again. Only...

One day she marched around the side of the house and confronted me. “I’ve seen you out there every day for the past week, and everyone knows you stare at me all day in school,...

The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.

You’re lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you’ve locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer...

Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in...

It’s one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.

I though, So this is how they send the angel. Stalled at the age when she loved you most.

The misery of other people is only an abstraction […] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one’s own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as...

Then he almost but didn’t say the two sentence he’d been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you

Even now all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written,...

…larger than life…I’ve never understood that expression. What’s larger than life?

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.

It would mark the end of a year that he might look back on as hands, a pivot between two lines. Or not: maybe enough time, would pass that eventually he would look back on...

Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.

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.

15. WHENEVER I WENT OUT TO PLAY, MY MOTHER WANTED TO KNOW EXACTLY WHERE I WAS GOING TO BEWhen I’d come in, she’d call me into her bedroom, take me in her arms, and cover...