I read about a famous mystery writer who worked for one week in a department store. One day she saw a woman come in and buy a doll. The mystery writer found out the woman’s name, and took a bus to New...
I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes; I give you three minutes to show me the spark.
I get rational when I panic.
I am so suggestible. When Chatty asks if I am hungry, I say, I could be. I would try to become the woman you wanted without even knowing I was trying. As it is, I am barely the woman I am.
He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.
A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea. You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long...
Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.
Here is what you do. You ease yourself into a tub of water, you ease yourself down. You lie back and wait for the ripples to smooth away. Then you take a deep breath, and slide your head under, and li...
Yesterday, where someone had dumped a cat-scratched leather recliner in the weedy empty lot around the corner, an elderly man was found sitting in the chair, quietly disoriented. The recliner looked l...
Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?
The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?
Tell me things I won't mind forgetting, she said. 'Make it useless stuff or skip it.
Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.
It’s the natural trajectory of a writing career that a writer becomes better at being herself.
I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn't know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would sn...
I would have written this next part into the story if anybody would have believed it. But who would have? I was there and I didn't believe it.
I think it was that love that I loved. That kind of involvement was reassuring; I felt it would extend to me, as well. That it did not or that it did, but only as much and no more, was confusing at fi...
I know that homes burn and that you should think what to save before they start to. Not because, in the heat of it, everything looks as valuable as everything else. But, because nothing looks worth th...