The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

Linda had gone to the piano and begun to play Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor, a bitter piece of music which gains in tragic intensity when played 40 times in a row.

Probably one day English will be a much-studied dead language; we should use this fact to preserve other languages to posterity.

Just because somebody is smiling doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be better off dead.

How can you say that you will not let a stupid person start something until the age of 12 and then say the reason you know they are stupid is they do not know something another person knows because they got to start at the age of 3?

he had seen how big it was and that it would hurt to talk. A lot of people would have had to make a joke or something, but we both knew it was too big for that and we both knew we knew it.

having heard the Arabic language put through the wringer of my father’s strong Hungarian accent she declared her native tongue off-limits, and insisted that he confine his atrocities to English and to French

She’s beautiful. When she’s excited. When she’s bored she looks like someone who’s got two weeks to live. Someone who’s got two weeks to live & is going to spend it begging the doctor for a mercy killing.

I felt ashamed, really ashamed of all the years I’d spent trying to identify the father who happened to be mine, instead of simply claiming the best on offer.

For someone who believes in the importance of rational argument Sib avoids the issue 9 times out of 10.