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Nothing in my father invited pity. Even his face was hard in a way that, as a child, I thought of as Roman in the imperial sense: his nose a bony triangle, his lips a hard line, his brow often knotted with determination. There was something very soldierly about his lean body.
Trust - Hernan Diaz
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Her face was a desolate ruin. A thing broken and abandoned, exhausted of being. Her eyes did not look at Benjamin but seemed to be there only so that he could peer into the rubble within.
Trust - Hernan Diaz
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For an hour or so, she would enjoy the bliss of impersonality--of becoming pure perception, of existing only as that which saw the mountaintop, heard the bell, smelled the air.
Trust - Hernan Diaz
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The future irrupts at all times, wanting to actualize itself in every decision we make; it tries, as hard as it can, to become the past. This is what distinguishes the future from mere fancy. The future happens. The Lord casts no one into hell; the spirits cast themselves down, according to Swedenborg. The spirits cast themselves into hell by their own free choice. And what is choice but a branch of the future grafting itself onto the stem of the present?
Trust - Hernan Diaz
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It was only in hindsight that she saw that all this prying had driven her to create a quiet, unassuming character, a role she performed with flawless consistency around her parents and their friends--inconspicuously polite, never speaking if it could be helped, responding with nods and monosyllables whenever possible, always looking away from people's eyes, avoiding the company of adults at all costs. That she never shed this persona made her wonder, later in life, if that was not who she had truly been all along or if, rather, over the years, her spirit had shaped itself after the mask.
Trust - Hernan Diaz
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The beer had the color of baby's pee, but we followed our usual routine and drank with joyless discipline until we both passed out.
The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen
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Whatever people say about The General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.
The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen
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She had a mind like an abacus, the spine of a drill instructor, and the body of a virgin even after five children. All of this was wrapped up in one of those exteriors that inspired our Beaux Arts--trained painters to use the most pastel of watercolors and the fuzziest of brushstrokes.
The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen
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He didn't think of himself as particularly generous or unusually good-spirited. Most things came easily to him: sports, school, friends, girls. He wasn't nice, necessarily; he didn't seek to be everyone's friend, and he couldn't tolerate boors, or pettiness, or meanness.
A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
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His father, who had emigrated to New York from Haiti, had died when JB was three, and although JB always liked to think that he remembered his face--kind and gentle, with a narrow strip of mustache and cheeks that rounded into plums when he smiled--he was never to know whether he only thought he remembered it, having grown up studying the photograph of his father that sat on his mother's bedside table, or whether he actually did.
A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara
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There were a lot of weddings in Eger that day, unless it was one huge wedding snaking through the city. You kept catching glimpses between the buildings: a band, a table heaped with flowers, a stern family assembled for a photograph. Statues and yellow-gray buildings stood out against an overcast sky. Peter took us to climb Eger's famous minaret: the northernmost Ottoman building in Europe. The mosque had been destroyed in 1841. Standing alone, the minaret looked hopelessly skinny and out of place, like it had wandered out there on a dare and gotten lost.
The Idiot - Elif Batuman
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At the same time, I also felt that these superabundant personage weren't irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn't the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you to more people.
The Idiot - Elif Batuman
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It felt almost as if, if we sat there longer, it might get warmer again - it might actually become earlier rather than later, and things might still turn out differently than they had.
The Idiot - Elif Batuman
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Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.
The Idiot - Elif Batuman
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One of the most common uses of the Turkish inferential, the book said, was in speaking to children. This, too, I remembered: "What seems to have happened to the doll?" The inferential tense allowed the speaker to assume the wonder and ignorance that children live in - that state when every piece of knowledge is basically hearsay.
There were things about -mi艧 that I liked: it had a kind of built-in bewilderment, it was automatically funny. At the same time, it was a curse, condemning you to the awareness that everything you said was potentially encroaching on someone else's experience, that your own subjectivity was booby-trapped and set you up to have conflicting stories with others. It compromised and transformed everything you said. It actually changed what verb tense you used. And you couldn't escape. There was no way to go through life, in Turkish or any other language, making only factual statements about direct observations. You were forced to use -mi艧, just by the human condition - just by existing in relation to other people.
The Idiot - Elif Batuman
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His face and head became overgrown with a wild and recalcitrant shock of gray hair, bristling in irregular tufts and spikes, shooting out from warts, from his eyebrows, from the openings of his nostrils and giving him the appearance of an old ill-tempered fox.
The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz
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We did not count him as one of us any more, so very remote had he become from everything that was human and real. Knot by knot, he loosened himself from us; point by point, he gave up the ties joining him to the human community.
The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz
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