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...
I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bo...
I know what the fear is.The fear is not for what is lost.What is lost is already in the wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Can you evade the dying of the brightness?Or do you evade only its warning?Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
All one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and d...
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.
There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not.... We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them,...
One of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties,
Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.
Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty, Philippe Ariès wrote to the...
The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New H...
That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one’s memory.
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...
Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is twenty-three, was raised in Virginia, and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. I feel it’s insane, he says, and his voice drops. This c...
Someday it all comes.
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.
Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.