Sublime

proffered

My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms.

The door opened and a woman in her late forties came out. She had permed hair, a linen jacket, printed skirt; her eyes were puffy and swollen from crying. So, it’s one of these offices, I thought. An office without a secondary exit. I liked secondary exits. The suffering needn’t meet the suffering in the anteroom of suffering.

Then he thanked the Lord for the eye of the beholder, that perjured witness.

was a child, people could be lost forever, but people were not as easily lost as they once were. Increasingly, all you needed was the desire to convert a person from a digital conjecture to the unruly flesh.

makes Jewish literature into a kind of anti-literature—one that should make everyone question what they want out of a work of literary art.

tragedy bores us unless it is preventable, that beauty is like pablum without a touch of the ludicrous.

“My mother’s grief was primitive and all-encompassing: it sucked the oxygen out of the air,” Gornick wrote in that memoir.