The overexamined life... It's not worth living.
The detectives slide back on the digital timeline to the moment when Mendelssohn steps out into the snowstorm: there is something of the Greek epic about it, the old gray man with his walking stick, v...
That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really lo...
Sure, I ached for the backroads of my hometown in Missouri, but leaving behind a scholarship would’ve been a defeat for my folks, who had no idea what it was like for me—they who thought their little...
Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything i...
She likes the word mother and all the complications it brings. She isn’t interested in true or birth or adoptive or whatever other series of mothers there are in the world. Gloria was her mother. Jazz...
Rain fell more steadily now. Grey and unrelenting. Nobody seemed to notice. Rain on the puddles. Rain on the high brickwork. Rain on the slate roofs. Rain on the rain itself.
Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.
My father had once told me the story of how, when he was in the work camp, a truckload of giant logs was brought in to be chopped. He was on ax duty with a gang of twelve. It was a dreadfully hot summ...
It’s like moving through a delicious fog.
It was one of those moments when everything is out of balance, I suppose, and just watching an odd thing seems to make sense. The squirrel scampered up a tree trunk, the sound of its nails like water...
It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave. Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left.
It is, in the end, she thinks, the shallowest of confessions: all of the truth, none of the honesty.
In the end you should probably know your characters as well as you know yourself. Not only what they had for breakfast this morning, but what they wanted to have for breakfast.
I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.
He has heard once that a man knows where he is from when he knows where he would like to be buried.
He glanced up in my direction and I froze. Quickly I turned away. There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear...
Every time a branch of mine got to being a decent size, that wind just came along and broke it.
At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign.
At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of y...