Alva

“All my life I have been trying to improve my German.
At last my German is better
—but now I am old and ill and don’t have long to live.
Soon I will be dead,
with better German.”
― Lydia Davis

“Women are like water. They are tempting like that, and they can be that treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless, you know? -- and that shallow.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“She watched all the episodes of Sex and the City, swaying into the downtown bars and ordering a cosmopolitan, wondering if that’s all it would take to make the confetti of young adulthood start falling.”
― Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes

“I wonder will I
ever see a grape again? When I think of the vineyard
where we met in October—when you dropped a cluster
custom insisted you be kissed by a stranger—how after
the harvest we plunged into a stream so icy our palms
turned pink. It seemed our future was sealed.”
― Mary Ruefle