Boris Fishman Quotes & Sayings

Working at the pharmacy, you get the impression that there are no healthy people in the world. The normal condition is not health but illness. — Boris Fishman

They kissed slowly, the human traffic of First Avenue taking them into its indifferent arms, the city's special combination of curiosity and resentment. — Boris Fishman

Tell me about the war," he pressed cautiously. She smiled again and began, "Well . . ." The sentence ended there. Her tongue moved but no words emerged. He wanted to say, Tell me because I'd like to tell my grandchildren one day. Tell me because it happened to you, and so I should know. Tell me because it will bring me closer to you, and I want to be close to you. But he was fifteen years old, and he didn't know how to express thoughts like these. He only knew that he wanted to know. He could tell that she would tell him anything but anything, only if he could stand it please don't make her talk about that. And though he grasped how important it was for him to know - even if everyone in the family had acquiesced not to trouble Grandmother about it - he couldn't bring himself to make her. So he said to her: "Forget about the war. Tell me about how you and Grandfather fell in love. — Boris Fishman

the left hand trembling in an eternal so-so. — Boris Fishman

The rehearsal of Grandfather's arguments came with wondrous facility to Slava. — Boris Fishman

At the wheel, Hamid Abdul was trying not to watch them. Hamid, his immigrant brother. How Slava was exceeding his immigrant brief with this fine-skinned American specimen. See Slava take the milk of this American skin into his mouth, Hamid. Look at her fingers disappear from your rearview mirror. We are miscegenating with the natives, Hamid, we are assimilating, are we not? — Boris Fishman

Can't I?" he said. "Did you know that they fertilized crops with human ash? After the war, the tomatoes were the size of an infant's head." He gave the words the same inflection that his grandfather did, only in English. They had a new but not unfamiliar sound on his tongue. He knew how to say them. — Boris Fishman

She breathed heavily, like a figure skater just off the ice. — Boris Fishman

Only weariness remained. It was a special kind of weariness that descended rarely, according to internal chemical regimens he did not understand. It made striving difficult, but also falsehood. — Boris Fishman

("It is a blessing to die in the natural order." - Sofia Gelman.) — Boris Fishman

They took a meandering route through the neighborhood, louche and gentrified all at once. — Boris Fishman

A woman lives a life of contradictions wrapped inside paradoxes wrapped inside a big candy wrapper. — Boris Fishman

No one was dead, but her son would not call just to call. She'd had to enter intimate terms with this new understanding in her life, like an illness. — Boris Fishman

Even though they, each for his own reason, did not wish to end the conversation, they had come to the end of what they could say in peace, and said goodbye. — Boris Fishman