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Meanwhile, he was saying to me, “I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste.
“If you weren’t bursting,” her teacher informed her, “you wouldn’t need patience.”
She can play Chopin with great charm.
it wasn’t just that I wanted to convince Lonoff of my pure and incorruptible spirit—my problem was that I wanted to believe it myself.
“Don’t try it,” he said. “If your life consists of reading and writing and looking at the snow, you’ll wind up like me. Fantasy for thirty years.”
“Ordinary human pleasures have nothing to do with it. Ordinary human pleasures be damned. The young man wants to be an artist.”
The subject is your extraordinary kindness and charity. Your concern for anyone in need—anyone except yourself, and your needs.”
Babel said that if he ever wrote his autobiography he’d call it The Story of an Adjective,
‘In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees.’
‘Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go, still have the feeling that you wanted to stay’?”
“Schumann, on Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 31.”
But “the madness of art”? I would have thought the madness of everything but art. The art was what was sane, no?
People don’t read art—they read about people.
She began to fear that she was succumbing to having not succumbed.
“So I took the sweet name—to impersonate everything that I wasn’t.
