Szabi and I figured out pretty fast that chalk doesn’t give you a fever at all, that it’s just a legend, because we each ate one and a half pieces of chalk and nothing happened to us, we even tried the 

When i arrived at Princeton, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings—younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of Lahore, but made through ingenious stone­masonry to look older

ANYONE WHO ASKED Professor Gauss about his early memories was told that such things didn’t exist. Memories, unlike engravings or letters, were undated. One came upon things in one’s memory that one sometimes was able, on reflection, to arrange in the right order.

LET ME TELL YOU the story of my friend, Anton Zwiebel.

You will soon realize that any story about Anton Zwiebel is also a story about me, Gustav Perle. In fact, I can’t imagine how I could set down any account of Anton Zwiebel’s life that didn’t include me. I am at the heart of Anton Zwiebel’s life and he is at the heart of mine.

Guests

THERE CAN CERTAINLY be no doubt about it. Something’s got into guests these days. You’ve got to keep an eye on them all the time. Even to make sure it’s their own overcoat they’re putting on. And that they don’t squeeze on an extra sheepskin hat.

THE YEAR THE BUS DRIVERS went on strike in Pittsburgh I was twenty-three and living on the edge of the city in a neighborhood that was on the verge of becoming a ghetto. I had just been fired

A WARM MAY NIGHT in Paris, 1903.     A hundred thousand Parisians left their homes in the middle of the night, streaming in crowds toward Saint-Lazare and Montparnasse, the railway stations.    Some hadn’t even gone to sleep,

A hunted animal will always try to run as far away as possible. The further it runs, the safer it feels. In 1985, after three years of running from the authorities in China, I finally headed for Tibet.

When school let out the two of us went to my backyard to fight. We were trying to make each other tougher. So in the grass, in the shade of the pines and junipers, Gordon and I slung off our backpacks and

It happens like this. He sets out in the afternoon on the track that has been shown to him and soon he leaves the little town behind. In an hour or so he is among low hills covered by olive trees and grey stones