Five days and the train has passed through many underworlds.
Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are to...
All the noise in my brain. I clamp it to the page so it will be still.
You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering...
You just read your books and go on a hundred miles away, You ignore me.
There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.
Now, see, that's why everybody wants Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy.' Dovey's phone buzzed, and she laughed, ignoring it....
It’s a funny thing to complain about, but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time back I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived I...
It was hard to see where all this could possibly go when it melted.
I looked hard out the window and understood suddenly that what I saw was full of color. A watercolor wash of summer light lay on the Catalina Mountains. The end of a depression is that clear: it’s as...
I had just dropped out of medicine in my first year of residency, a few months shy of becoming a licensed M.D. I'd discovered there was something serious, mainly a matter of nerve and perhaps empathy,...
Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
God hates us, I said.Don't blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from Congolese ants.They have to swarm over a village and eat other people alive...
For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.
Every education brings a point of reckoning, and this was his: seeing the world divided in two camps, the investigators and the sweeteners
But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will di...
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
The most remarkable feature of human culture is its capacity to reach beyond the self and encompass the collective good; yet,
These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their great c...
That means you're my kid, I explained, and I'm your mother, and nobody can say it isn't so.