Life Between Moments: New York Stories

In rare instances, however, the exceptional can mistake themselves for ordinary. This usually happens when a viable aspiration is stymied by discouragement, or when ambition exists so briefly that it ends up extinguishing itself. When potential is unrealized, only tragedy remains.

The commute levels everyone, and for a moment makes you feel as if you are no different from the compromised and forgettable faces filling the car.

The remainder were as ordinary as ill-fitting tiles in a mosaic (that is to say, they were not ordinary by any measure).

I don’t go to Roxanne’s because it does me any good. Like all the others that sit on the squeaky, stained bar stools under the red lights, I go because I need the eggs.

I say I knew of the caste system, yet I only knew this in the manner that those who have never felt hunger “know” that people can and do starve in places out of sight. There is no emotion attached to the knowledge, nothing visceral, nothing heeded any other way than intellectually.

How ambitious can you actually be if your path is trimmed by a John Deere and lined with string lights well before you even arrive?

But the storyteller in me overpowers my pragmatism. There was no decision-making process, only the steady impulse to put words on paper until, when I came up for air, I realized what sat in my lap.

Everyone wants a miracle but all they get is life.

“Why must a man who cares neither for wealth nor intellect bear the responsibility of both, and each to the utmost?”