Whenever teachers said there was good news, it almost always turned out to be nothing of the sort.

Something stinks round here, I said, and stopped. It’s coming from the ravine.

The older you are, the less exposure you can tolerate.

I even had erotic dreams in which the chess pieces lusted after each other.

The leg I don’t have is what hurts.

Krakow in my childhood didn’t belong to anyone.

We should’ve sorted it out when he was nine, when he hung the neighbor’s cat.

He tries to cram St. John of Nepomuk into a shaggy fur coat.

They were different from the Germans she knew in the Reich.

Bgashev’s been dead a few years now and he’s been coming to see me all this time.

Of course I was named after Leonid Brezhnev!

I explained at the top of my voice that my daughter had disappeared.

His father had just been taken down from the branch of a ceiba tree.

Inside the trunk was another lifeless body.

I go in and out of memories as one fighting to stay awake.

“He really looks like his monkey, doesn’t he?”

Papá’s words have a dry smell, as dry as the skin on his lips.

Young Aurora, said the butcher, wasn't Miss Aurora at all.

You pour water onto the severed head once again.

He said they’d taken Omar away naked.

How does a person follow the path of a fairy tale?

“Salamalaykum, Uncle, your nephew sent me. Said you’d give me the cash.”

From now on I just have three compass points, not four.

The surprise shook me like an earthquake.

Slowly but surely, exile erases us from the memory of our land.

The Iraqi love of water has inspired me to learn about the rivers of every city I visit.

“I thought you'd know the way. You were born and raised here.”

Why did he have to sleep with his bride?

But remembering the future helped me to operate in the present.

“Open that parcel when you can. And forgive me.”

The first volume of Bogumil Linde’s Polish-language encyclopedia (Abakus–gulasz) hit his head with a thump.

“I’m interested in that so-called thriller you wrote.”

I have been in the white room for five months and twenty days now.

The teenage girls began chatting aimlessly in rhythmic tones punctuated by robust usage of the F-word.

The town shook, burned, smoked, but it was still standing, and she was still alive, and the Red Army was gone.

It is true that dropping one’s host in the well does not demonstrate much sense of propriety.

Had he used a bayonet, or a knife? Had he felt hatred? Pleasure?

“We needed some liquid gold,” Milla says very seriously.

Was everything perfect enough?

I had not seen meat on my plate since I left home.

I was born to be afraid.

“And while we’ve been busy digging graves we’ve missed it all.”

“I poisoned you, my love,” Alevtyna purrs.

“Looks like you’re a liar. Is that correct?”

I say we go. It can’t be worse than it is here.

“And that shadowy bit you see up there, that’s the thing that has me worried.”

“Do you know how many policemen’s numbers I have in my phone?”

All decent Jews go to America.

Mus‘ad, my youngest son, is more than two years old, and I've never seen him.

The throng was slowly making for the two officers, a clash close at hand.

“I am the Great Lord Pabori, who eats the roast of seven lions!”

“I was a fool. I will die and you will live. Return to our young now!”

The cat said, “If I fetch him from down here, what will you give me?”

Dusk in the Latin Quarter was like a fairy tale or a love poem, like a Klimt mosaic, like glowing, rose-colored clouds reaching toward the heavens.

My face was more akin to Florentine portraits of androgynous ephebes than to paintings of ancient heroes.

Your problem is that you say you are gay but have never seen a gay guy in your entire life.”

It was almost Christmas, I had a cavity, and I was in the process of getting dumped.

In fact, Teldj no longer felt anything at all. She only pretended to. She only thought about Algeria.

His skin and hair gave off an intoxicating scent of apples.

I opened it and wrote the first date, and what would be the first chapter of that extraordinary life that was my own.