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.
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.
I have already lost touch with a couple people I used to be.
He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them
Everyone was younger then, and in the telling a certain glow suffuses those years.
Some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.
I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering o...
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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...
She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.
Occult enchantment, from that febrile complex of resentments and revenges and idealizations and taboos which renders exile so potent an organizing principle.
Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy. That is not a remarkable thing to say, b...
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...
The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution… In theory, these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment whe...
Sonora
Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.
She never puts on any weight, you’ll notice that’s often true of selfish women.
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.