In the summer quiet. Just be. Joshua liked the Beatles, used to listen to them in his room, you could hear the noise even through the big headphones he loved. Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it...
In Florida, her father had once said at dinner: I like Negroes, yessir. I think everyone should own one. She had stormed from the table and stayed in her room for two days. Her dinner was slid under t...
I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
I remember thinking that they went like lovers. They could not survive without each other. It was like they had spent their lives breathing each other’s breath.
I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The r...
I felt exasperated by her, always turning, always changing, always making me feel as if I was looking for oxygen--how much like fresh air and how much, at the same time, like drowning.
I can still to this day hear my folks whispering and laughing before they went off to sleep: perhaps it is all I want to recall, perhaps our stories should stop on a dime, maybe things could begin and...
How long ago it was and how strange, but all dead friends come to life again sometimes.
He was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under.
Everyone knows where they are from when they know where it is they want to be buried.
And what is it we give our children anyway, except the ability to not become us?
Aber das ist das Problem mit dem Alter: Man hat ein Gefühl, aber kein Datum. Und wenn man das Datum ausgräbt, verliert man das Gefühl.
A bi gezunt, his mother would have said. She was always one for the ancient phrase. You have your health, what more do you want? —
Women in long dresses, aloof and elegant, the mark of bonnet ribbons still on the soft of their necks.
Wir stolpern dahin, tragen ein wenig Geräusch in die Stille und wirken in anderen fort.
What he liked about his brother, he said, is that he made people become what they didn't think they could become. He twisted something in their hearts. Gave them new places to go. Even dead, he'd stil...
What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the war, the poverty--was that life could be...
We seldom know what echo our actions will find, buy our stories will most certainly outlast us.
To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn't a hippie idea. Both of us always hated the hippies, their flowers, their poems, t...
There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten s...