"The History of Love" [.]

[fiefoe]

Somebody in the book shared my confusion at one point: 'Now I was confused all over again because I thought this Mr. Moritz was Alma's father. The only thing I could think of was that Alma's father had a lot of children who didn't know him. Maybe this man's brother was one and Alma was another, and they were both looking for their father at the same time.'

• It was only a newspaper, but I wanted to holler it at the top of my lungs. Isaac! Here I am! Can you hear me, my little Isaac? .
• And I laughed, too. It was me who'd taken the picture, and if it was proof of his existence, it was also proof of my own.
• Bruno had managed to leave a dusting of flour over the entire floor of the place. Maybe a wind had blown in, who knows. In the bedroom I saw that he had gotten down on the floor and made an angel in the flour.
  
• I'd imagined his place many times. But never with a lake. The oversight pained me.
  
• When had he grown bigger than me? What had I been doing, and what had he, at the exact moment my son had surpassed me in size?
  

....................................................

• "Well did you know that you can starve by just eating rabbit meat?"
• Instead, mixed in with dirty clothes under my bed and two weeks overdue, I found The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz.
• I imagined rooms all over the city that housed archives no one has ever heard of, like last words, white lies, and false descendants of Catherine the Great.
• He crunches on the mint and wiped his nose with a handkerchief. "My wife tells me it's no talent to be a matchmaker for the dead, so I tell her if you always drink vinegar, you don't know anything sweeter exists."
• Why do people always get named after dead people? If they have to be named after anything at all, why can't it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas, which never really die, not even bad ones?
• During the time I waited, a whole species of butterfly may have become extinct, or a large, complex mammal with feelings like mine.
  

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