Showing posts with label NYRB Classics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NYRB Classics. Show all posts

 

"My heart was not trained to love anyone but him. I could only love one person. This was my innate principle. It would disrupt the nervous system to be otherwise. It goes against nature to be otherwise. I cannot just transfer my affections, for they are carved in stone, and were decreed three billion years before this ocean rolled."

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Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann

 

"The smoke caressed his long-chastened palate, the familiar fragrance tickling his nose, overpowering his brain, soothing his ancient, torpid blood and stirring long-forgotten sensations within him. What did he care for the chatter that surrounded him? For constitutional law, for Viennese intrigues, for Dreyfus or Labori? He leaned back into his chair and began digesting."

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Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi

 

"And this steady rhythm of living and working got into me, so that I felt part of it and had my place, a foot in both present and past; I was utterly content."

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A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

 

"To drive an open red car beside a pretty and exciting and very up-to-date girl knowledgeable in all the matters that very up-to-date girls need to know, but more than that: beside the beloved, the beloved herself, the most desirable woman in the world—obsession incubus fate mystery vice secrecy fashion evil perdition love—she beside him with a blue kerchief with white dots tied underneath her chin, an enticing, haughty peasant girl; to ride this way in an open car was wonderful..."

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A Love Affair by Dino Buzzati

 

"Again he said, 'That's disgusting. How do you expect me to seduce anyone under conditions like that? If you're not going to resist—well, then it's out of the question. I'll have to think it over.' And he walked back into the sculpture studio to join the others."

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Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot with Carlton Lake


"On the whole, the wish to materially possess a thing or person conceals an intention to free oneself of them and move on to something else. What we have possessed we can put behind us, put in the past."

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Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli

"So, life after death is to fall in love once more, to set up a little business, to learn to drive a car, take airplane trips, go to the sun for vacations."
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Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

"I would have loved to write, but as I've said, creativity requires a state of grace. So many things are required for it to succeed--stimulus and composure, inner peace and a kind of bittersweet excitement--and these elements were missing."

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The Door by Magda Szabo and translated by Len Rix

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