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...

The malpractice for advice-giving is like five times as much as a craniotomy.

He went on for some time while I sat listening in silence because I knew he was right, and like two people who have loved each other however imperfectly, who have tried to make a...

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.

Era normal ensartar las palabras en un hilo para guiarlas y evitar que se extraviaran por el camino hacia su destino

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. But often I did –...

. . . 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...

When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit

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 woman who later became his wife was sleeping in his bed, her face buried in the pillows and her feet crossed on top of each other like a child’s. He watched her sleep and...

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.

Peleaba por descubrir sentimientos nuevos (…). Se creaban nuevas formas de alegría al tiempo que nuevas clases de tristeza. La eterna decepción de lo que es la vida, el alivio de un respiro inesperado, el...

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:...