In the shady northeast corner of the park, where vines have overcome the water fountains, and evergreens grow, rangy and unkempt as in the depths of Vronsky Forest, I came upon two children doing something very naughty. I had wandered to this most rustic corner of the Common seeking quietude and relief from the dogs recently permitted by a foolish ordinance to run free without leashes in the park. 

Find a little yellow side-street house. Put an older woman in it. Dress her in that tatty favorite robe, pull her slippers up before the sink, have her doing dishes, gazing nowhere — at her own backyard. Gazing everywhere. Something falls outside, loud.

Let’s us celebrate small town beauticians.

All the women ones and some of them kind, particular and tasteful boys. Godsends, the entire curling bunch. Underpaid, they do more local good than many doctors I could name.

I am not a lucky traveler. Business has taken me often to the far parts of the world and on these journeys I have made it unhappy practice to fall ill in the place I am visiting. This time it is nothing more

The bus seemed more crowded than it was, because half the passengers were smashed into the forward quarter. I stood with five other people on the steps by the front door; and whenever the bus swerved I held onto a metal post, the doors swung open, and my back hung out over the street.

She was choosing cucumbers at the grocery store and wondering what sorts of genitalia cicadas had when someone touched her on the shoulder. She prepared her public face and turned, expecting to see her friend the produce man.

I’ve never understood about fishing and buffalo stomachs. I admit it freely. I am no cannibal. But there are connections between me and the world.

Keeping a journal is a perilous thing, and we should be warned against it as children.

Signor Perso was the last person who knew who I’d been, and when I found him—naked but for his dressing gown, his white mustache perfectly groomed, his hands folded over the little volume on his chest as if he’d laid himself out for the occasion

Oleo’s is hopping. Fat Carlo is sweating away behind the bar, dipping and dripping in the ice-cream bins. He looks up for an instant as Stefan comes in - grins - and then re-applies himself. The Moped Gestapo, installed on the left, is demanding Der Stürmerfrom Emile, spastic fifty-year-old alumnus of Theresienstadt.