More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For an instant Sammy cupped the tiny flame this secondhand compliment lit within him. Then he blew it out.
MONDAY DAWNED as the most beautiful morning in the history of New York City. The sky was as blue as the ribbon on a prize-winning lamb.
And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation, and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.
Her eyes got very big, and her throat, her cheeks, her ears were flooded with the bright heart’s blood of humiliation. Joe could see her making an effort not to look away.
“It was just something I—pursued.” She gave an explanatory sigh as if tired of her own tale.
The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.
Generally, Kornblum said very little during the final portion of every lesson, sitting on the lid of the plain pine box that he had bought from a local coffin maker, smoking and taking his ease with a copy of Di Cajt while, inside the box, Joe lay curled, roped and chained, permitting himself sawdust-flavored sips of life through his nostrils, and making terrible, minute exertions.
For several years, she had been wishing him, willing him, into maturity, independence, a general proficiency beyond his years, as if hoping to skip him like a stone across the treacherous pond of childhood, and now she was touched by
