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History is the error we are forever correcting.
i know that belief is the last thing I own. even when everything is gone? that’s the point, the seminarian taps. not everything goes.
It takes nothing less than the whole might of the state to erase a person, but only the error of one individual—if that is what memory is now called—to preserve her.
Their deaths have aged us, as if their unlived years have been added to our lived years and we bear the disappointments of both the lives we have and haven’t lived,
For inspiration, I studied pamphlets from the tourist bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston.
she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.
The megalopolis in his mind has quieted to a country road.
Wealth announces itself with what’s easy to break and impossible to clean.
If a stopped clock is right twice a day, a bad haircut is right twice a decade.
“I know I should count my blessings, but that’s what accountants are for.”
Sealed within the worn postcard edges was a sunlit world where my mother splintered into thousands of imagined selves,
It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life’s madness: The institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano.
There are more ways to remember one person than there are people in the world.
“You will have the last human thought,” I whispered. “You will be that thought,” he said. “You will have the last word.” “Your name will be the last word.”
He wants a little fish soup in a saucer and the occasional scratch on the head. I want the illusion that an animal bred to trade affection for food can understand the inquietudes of my soul.
I should’ve gone to class, but I hadn’t gone once this term and didn’t want to confuse the professor by showing up.
Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.
because every school must have its outcasts and weirdos, and I know from personal experience that there is no escape from that untouchable caste but suicide or matriculation.
everybody knows that wrongs cancel each other out. That’s why it’s called moral arithmetic.
The floor was twice carpeted, once with rugs, and again with their scattered clothes.
Anywhere beyond reach of MegaFon cell service is well beyond the sight of God.
His mind had so firmly wrapped around this one single idea of what awaited him that no space remained for what was actually there.
There are so many paths to contentment if you’re open to self-delusion.
To say he felt guilty would ascribe to him ethical borders that were lines on a map of a country that no longer existed.
It was late in the day, late in the century. Too late to become someone else.
Who can you be but the chest your child shouts into.
I figured that somewhere online, there must be a list of Americans who will believe anything, no matter how implausible or insulting to their intelligence.” “Is there such a list?” Sergei spun white froth in his glass. “Tom Hanks’s Facebook fan page.”
They were building a life of small kindnesses together. Some days it was extraordinary.
Consider the stars as apertures in a spherical firmament, pinpricks in a veil through which the light of an outer existence shines. And are those pinpricks points of entry or departure? And what darkness does this plane cast onto the next?
If ever there was an utterance of perfection, it is this. If God has a voice, it is ours.
We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space.
