The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Not for the first time, he puzzled over the curious nature of families—that family bonds tended to keep together people who had little in common. He would never have chosen the members of his family as friends.

In general she likes to be accompanied by men: they offer protection both because of their large size and because of their rational outlook on the world.

When in moments of difficult truth-seeking he saw this incongruity, he felt sick that he should be saddled with himself, as though he were his own unwanted guest.

The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him.

Mothers, when they are guests at dinner, eat well, like children, but seem absent. It is often the case that they cannot follow what we are doing or saying. It is often the case, also, that they enter the conversation only when it turns on our youth; or they accommodate where accommodation is not wanted; smile and are misunderstood. And yet mothers

I told myself I liked the way cowboys dressed, starting with the hat, and how comfortable they were in their clothes, so practical, having to do with their work. Many professors seem to dress the way they think a professor should dress, without any real interest or love.

There was a strange gap between volition and action: sitting at his desk, before his work but not working, he dreamt of perfection in many things, and this exhilarated him. But when he took one step toward that perfection, he faltered in the face of its demands.

His inconsistency. His inability to finish anything. His sudden terrifying feelings that nothing he did mattered. His realizations that what went on in the outside world had more substance than anything in his life.

Wassilly, suddenly enlightened, saw that there was a terrible discrepancy between his conception of himself and the reality. He admired himself and at times felt slightly superior to others, not because of what he really was and what he had really done with himself, but rather because of what he could do, what he would soon do, what he would accomp