People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The...
Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.
Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.
Happiness is,' after all, a consumption ethic.
Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.
This book is called Blue Nights because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days,the inevitability of the fading, the dy...
Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is nothing.
Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.
Information was control.
I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
I put the word diagnosis in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a diagnosis led to a cure, or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility.
Instead, ourselves the beneficiaries of this kind of benign neglect, we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us.
It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up cau...
I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.
It was the kind of Sunday to make one ache for Monday morning.
In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it.