[b]Jonathan Safran Foer
In the water I saw my father’s face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we were created.[/b]
Around here we don’t have that kind of water. As far as I know.
Or perhaps a widow found him and took him in: brought him an easy chair, changed his sweater every morning, shaved his face until the hair stopped growing, took him faithfully to bed with her every night, whispered sweet nothings into what was left of his ear, laughed with him over black coffee, cried with him over yellowing pictures, talked greenly about having kids of her own, began to miss him before she became sick, left him everything in her will, thought of only him as she died, always knew he was fiction but believed in him anyway.
Sometimes you just have to settle for things.
There are many premium writers, yes? Tolstoy, yes? He wrote War, and also Peace, which are both premium books.
Never even finished War myself.
Good people don’t make fewer mistakes, they’re just better at apologizing.
Bad people never apologize at all. And there’s no getting better than that.
The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jews have four hundred for schmuck.
And it’s still not enough.
He spent the next weeks blocking scenes of the bureaucrat fucking his wife. On the floor with cooking ingredients. Standing, with socks still on. In the grass of the yard of their new and immense house. He imagined her making noises she never made for him and feeling pleasures he could never provide because the bureaucrat was a man, and he was not a man. Does she suck his penis? he wondered. I know this is a silly thought, a thought that will only bring me pain, but I can’t free myself of it. And when she sucks his penis, because she must, what is he doing? Is he pulling her hair back to watch? Is he touching her chest? Is he thinking of someone else? I’ll kill him if he is.
Of course not even all bureaucrats are the same.