Operation Shylock

It is an appealing voice to listen to, alive with the dramatic cadences of the master storyteller and vibrant in its own distinctly quiet way—and I was listening very hard.

I listened intently to all the suppositions spawned by his unbearable grievance, to the sufering spilling out of him in every word...

The end of the Holocaust is written on that wall in Palestinian blood.

I even put them up to my nose, quickly one and then the other, to sniff their papery odor, that pleasant moldering smell that faintly perfumes old library stacks.

she aroused in me the sort of yearnings excited by the thought of a luxuriously warm fur coat on a freezing winter day：specifically, a craving to be enwrapped.

There was the sharp smack of a gavel striking, the judge‘s way of suggesting to Kamil that perhaps it was time to shut up.

...having sniped at a ruined father‘s sentimental maunderings with a faultfinding adolescent‘s spiteful tongue...

Philip Roth fucking Philip Roth! That, I'm afraid, is a form of masturbation too fancy even for me.

Cynicism increases with age because the bullshit piles up on your head.

She smiled at the earnest “Then,” an intimate smile that was no more, really, than a slow curling at the corner of the mouth, something that could only be measured in millimeters but that was, in my book, the very epitome of sexual magic.

with outlandish events so wildly careening around every corner that there is nowhere for intelligence to establish a foothold and develop a perspective.

at the sudden sight of someone here I knew, my heart thumped and I felt like a married man who, spotted at a restaurant in ardent conversation with an illicit lover, quickly begins to calculate how best to introduce her.