I learned why 'out riding alone' is an oxymoron: An equestrian is never alone, is always sensing the other being, the mysterious but also understandable living being that is the horse.
We knew right off how to think of them but not precisely how to feel about them.
She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publ...
One signal conversation, which she had lingered near for ten minutes, between two woman German professors, had concerned a support group they both belonged to for people with an overwhelming compulsio...
Northerners, even abolitionists, knew more about how and why to chop down the slavery tree than they ever knew what to do with its sour fruit.
It was always and ever hard to tell with women why they chose one way and not another.
I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future.
Hmmph, said Mrs. Walker, or rather, without speaking, she launched this hmmph into the air of the room and allowed it to float there.
He trusted only Devers, and why was that? Devers said, We’re going here, and they went there. Devers said, Expect this and that, and this and that came to pass. But the rumor was that Ike didn’t like...
Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.
Dean Harstad had unbounded patience, the very patience that drove Chairman X bananas, patience as a weapon.
Almonds. Apricots. Avocadoes. Some peaches I don't know. Grapefruit. Lemones. Probably oranges.
I had been with my father so constantly for so long that I knew less and less about him with every passing year. Every meaningful image was jumbled together with the countless moments of our daily lif...
A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the...
In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to...
That there is such pleasure in enmity that after a while it cannot be left off even if one would will it. Another thing is also true, that when a quarrel is new, one’s friends hold one back, and give...
Like a man who has jumped off a diving board, but then, through force of will, lowers himself inch by inch into the pool.
You don't make 'em trot for one thing and run for the other.
What? he would say, practically snapping to attention. What I had thought to be of passing interest would now take on profound fascination as I read it aloud, and Pat would inhale it. A few hours or a...
Well, being a perfectionist seems okay from the outside, but a perfectionist never enjoys anything, no matter how well it goes, because nothing is ever perfect.