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...