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...

I want to say somewhere: I’ve tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a...

She [my mother] was the force around which our world turned. My mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all our arguments. One disapproving word...

Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you.

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...

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.

I smiled back, the importance of manners, my mother always said, is inversely related to how inclined one is to use them, or, in other words, sometimes politeness is all that stands between oneself and...

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.

I’ve reached the age where bruises are formed from failures within rather than accidents without.

Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can’t protect her child – not from pain, or...

HOW ANGELS SLEEP. Unsoundly. They toss and turn, trying to understand the mystery of the living. They know so little about what it’s like to fill a new prescription for glasses and suddenly see the...

No es que hayamos olvidado por completo el lenguaje de los gestos (…) cuando está oscuro y no podemos ver, sentimos la necesidad de tocar el cuerpo del otro para hacernos entender”.

She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only...

Mom?” I said. She turned. “Can I talk to you about something?” “Of course, darling. Come here.”I took a few steps into the room. There was so much I wanted to say. “I need you...

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.” “I look exactly the same.” “No, you...