You have your wonderful memories, people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the clos...
When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not. On...
Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened.
They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to...
These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.
The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a...
The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself.
That I am trapped in this particular irrelevancy is never more apparent to me than when I am home. Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one’s past at every turn, around every corn...
Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.
Rarely have we seen so much made over so little.
Once she was born, I was never not afraid.
Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about.
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their bes...
Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? . . . It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.
Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad consc...
Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.
January 11, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak an...
It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could not keep. I could not always take care of her. I could not never leave her. She was no longer a child. She was an adult. Things happened in life...
In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.
In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside.