Failure is the story, but the story itself is also failure.

In the mornings Alexei Petrovich’s Mama yawns loud and long: hurrah, onward, a new morning gushes in through the window; the cactuses shine, the curtains quiver; the gates of the nighttime realm

Harry and Allen left the keyhole and tip-toed down the hall to where their shoes were. Neither one said anything until they reached the foot of the curving staircase and sat down to put their shoes back on. Then the older one, who was eleven, spoke.

Later—much later, when he had been for a long time that full-grown man they’d promised him as child—he still sometimes was caught by that feeling of being followed on a lonely road, sometimes by figures without a name and almost without a form, but mostly just by the eyes.

Victor had just opened the door and taken his young wife in his arms to carry her over the threshhold, when the agent, Judgeworth, stepped out of the bushes and asked him if he did not think this the right moment to buy a good, solid insurance policy. Marietta laughed and Victor said, “Certainly not!”

He was a stranger in this small town. He knew nobody here and from the moment that he left the railway-station in that dark night, he was overcome by a feeling of being very much alone; the emptiness of an unknown provincial town on the last evening of the year is colder and larger than any other form of loneliness.

When Jane left me for Barry Kramer, it was a dark and heavy sort of hurt, but she had not been happy in our house anyway, and I felt that there was little to be done.

Bob Munroe woke up on his face. He had rolled over in the night and now his arms were pinned beneath him. They were numb and rubbery and, in that dark, cloudy time between sleep and waking, Bob wondered if someone hadn't come along and stolen his arms in the night.

  When Boris Tomashevsky told his wife, Emily, about the afternoon he spent on Portobello Road, he neglected to mention the owls made of glass. First, he took off his coat and remarked what a lovely day it had been outside. It had been perfectly brisk, he said, the kind of day that does wonders for the heart. He asked her how her afternoon had been and told her of his own.

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.