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...