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And he sees himself stepping into the no-man's-land, he stands there completely unprotected on that precious, coveted patch of earth fought over by half the world, and God is cruel, but people are crueler, and he hunches down and begins zigzagging through the rain of bullets to the barbed-wire entanglement, between the lifeless bodies of his predecessors.

…just tell me how you want me, she says, standing in front of the romanticized battlefield, and he issues hesitant instructions, but whatever he says, she does meekly, and he understands why she loves photography, why he used to love it too, it creates the illusion of complete control, a few square inches of the world in which no disappointment, fear, or sorrow exists.

And they look at each other across the sun-striped table, and the strange thing is, now that they've both admitted they're unhappy it no longer matters, and he thinks he understands what it is to be married, to be linked inseparably to another human being until your death, it's impossible to have enough of her, to leave her, she's part of him, like his legs or his eyes, […].

…they still haven't found his body, she says, and he hears the hope in her voice, vain hope, she knows that, […] and he tells her about his memory loss and how four years after the war, when no one thought it might still be possible, his wife and children found him, and it surprises him how easily his life can be reshaped into an inspiring story, correct in every factual detail, yet a lie from beginning to end.

No, she says, not like that, I wont have it, and she says it softly and can't look Dr. De Moor in the eye, but she is adamant, and Noon is so proud of her, and she is his wife, his wife, and for the first time he understands what it is to belong to someone, why people get married, a woman standing up for you as if for herself, and he'll never face anything alone again, as long as she's with him he knows he'll be safe

And she doesn't say it, but […] this simple man who stands before her in his scruffy asylum uniform, could never live up to the standards she's set for her Kamiel, who's been missing since December 1917, she's had almost five years to perfect him,he is her masterpiece, her sanctuary, and she's outraged that Dr. De Moors advertisement persuaded her that her Kamiel could ever assume the shape of a madman with amnesia

I want to explain her in a way that would make you love her, but the problem with this is that loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes. It's nearly impossible, at least in my experience, to listen to someone telling a story about their partner and not wish they'd get to the point a little faster.

Carmen's ex-boyfriend Tom was a social worker and weekend DJ who eventually left her for reasons I never quite managed to grasp. Carmen typically speaks about him the way one might refer to a degree: a three-year period one has to endure in order to talk with overbearing authority on exactly one subject. She is the world's living expert on loving and losing thirty-year-old men named Tom.

The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness.

What you have to understand is that things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right sort of skin.

Как наука история не нужна, как мифотворчество - постоянно востребована. Это неудивительно. Наука разрушает иллюзии, без которых люди не могут жить.

A key premise of the myth is that she [Helen of Troy] is attractive in some absolute and total way that defies description […]. As Blondell neatly puts it, 'A beauty that is in the eye of the beholder may launch a ship or two, but only a beauty upon which all beholders agree can bind a generation of heroic males under oath and generate an enterprise as cataclysmic as the Trojan War.'

Readers of contemporary fiction are likely to expect a
'good' translation to read smoothly and fluently in English, masking its status as a translation, whereas readers of canonical ancient literature in translation are less likely to have these expectations, no matter how smooth or fluent the original may be.

Sappho appealed to later poets because she created a new way of speaking about distance, alienation and desire. If her work is universal, it is not because she invites us in - even if 'we' belong to particular marginalised groups, as women, lesbians or oppressed minorities - but because she shows us what it means to be excluded and alone.

They wouldn't have erupted with the vigor of those vinegar-and-baking-soda contraptions so many of us made as science fair experiments. No,these volcanoes were nothing more than big cracks in the ground,often miles long,that continuously belched out lava,year after year,decade after decade,century after century.
The eruptions at the end of the Permian lasted for a few hundred thousand years,perhaps even a few million

It feels so American to discount dreams because they're not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.

My whole life I've thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It's actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accommodate her.

When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, 'gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.' But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think about the effects of that stuff. Nobody thinks of now as the future past.

The whiskey did, for him, what a bedside table did for normal people—it was always at the head of his mattress, holding what was essential to him in place. It lifted him daily from the same sleep it eventually set him into.

…о той точке, где общее прошлое еще не распалось, но общего будущего уже не существует.

hopeless questions that dont have answers
most of all i wonder if he felt alone
he hated being alone

last time i was in the old country, i was at this corner shop, and the guy who worked there was like jesi li ti odavde (are you from here), and so i said, pola-pola, hrvatski i norveški, imam obitelj odavde (i have family from here, so then he asked if i was visiting them, my family, but i was just like, theyre ... whats the word (cos i didnt know it), and he said holiday? and i went nah, dead

I deliberately gave the girls the kind of names where they could pick what they wanted to call themselves when they were older, she continues, holding the wine glass so the wine cascades in one neat glide down her throat. I always wondered if Elizabeth might become a Liz, or a Betty, or even a Beth. Same with Catherine. We called her Kitty, but she might have become a Katie or a Cathy or maybe stayed with Catherine.

Both of us have exposed ourselves within that room, with its drapes all over the TV, one of us with words and one of us with inaction, and the vulnerability hangs between us.

“Getting dumped by a therapist on our first day”, Johnny says to fill the silence.

I'm afraid to laugh, afraid to agree.

As they lean against their high-school lockers, he looks into her eyes, holding her shoulders. ‘I don't know what I'm going to do without you, but I don't ever want it to come to that’, he is telling her. I laugh at the dialogue, but my stomach warms at the kind, concerned way he looks at her.

"What will you cook? Maybe lasagne?" Maia asks, and Cora knows, again, that she has done the right thing, because no child should ever be so used to fitting around a parent that they will suggest the food they like least themselves.

Cora wants to say it matters because sometimes big men feel small inside. Because some people — like Gordon's father — travel through life believing themselves so far beyond improvement, they come to think their children, and their children's children, should all be made in their name. Because sometimes their need to please previous generations is greater than their need to love future ones.

Do you not see the risk? she'd wanted to say. Do you not see that calling our son Gordon might mean he ends up like you? But she couldn't. Because surely that was the point.

If cooking is a funeral, eating is its burial, grace, eulogy.