A series of sentences that begin with the word “sometimes” — Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes it’s cold outside, and the cold gets inside. Sometimes I pick up my phone to look at the weather app, and I actually look at the weather app. Sometimes you ask for something, and then you wonder why the thing you asked for looks nothing like…

Hermann Hesse’s short novel carries so much weight — What is a good book to buy for a high school graduate? A friend asked me this recently. I don’t like giving book recommendations, but I wanted to help my friend. I suggested Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.* Not long after I graduated high school, 20 years ago, someone gifted me…

The answer is (almost) always the same — The other day, while waiting for the F train, my partner noticed two small children standing eerily close to the platform edge. He asked me, “Why are those kids alone?” (My partner has lived in NYC since 1992. Isn’t it amazing that he can still be surprised by something like…

February, the shortest month, can feel like the longest. Here in New York City, February is usually the coldest month. Shortest, longest, coldest. This year, 2022, the second month became notable for its multiple twos. On February 22nd, it was 2/22/22. Twosday, people called it. A palindrome. Backwards. Forwards. …

All the sentences with “sometimes” in Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’ — She resented it, had a scruple picked up Heaven knows where, or, as she felt, sent by Nature (who is invariably wise); yet she could not resist sometimes yielding to the charm of a woman, not a girl, of a woman confessing, as to her they often did, some scrape…

All the sentences with “sometimes” in F. Scott Fitzergald’s 1925 novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ — Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. “I just slip it on sometimes when I don’t care what I look…

All the sentences with “sometimes” in W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel ‘The Painted Veil’ — Sometimes she would have liked to shake him. Her happiness, sometimes almost more than she could bear, renewed her beauty. They could not meet often alone, not half often enough for him, but he had to think of her first, sometimes in the curio shop, now and then after luncheon…

All the sentences with “sometimes” in Willa Cather’s 1926 novel ‘My Mortal Enemy’ — It was sometimes terrible, too, as I was to find out later. “But they’ve been happy, anyhow?” I sometimes asked her. Sometimes I can still take a drive along the shore. “Sometimes they go to the movies, and stay out later,” he said mournfully. “Sometimes she has locked me out…

All the sentences with “sometimes” in A. A. Milne’s 1926 book ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ — It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. Sometimes Winnie-the-Pooh likes a game of some sort when he comes downstairs, and sometimes…