In Coffeeville, Miss., at 6 p.m., there was a golden light and a child swinging in it, swinging from a big tree, over a big lawn, back and forth in front of a big airy house. To be a white middle-clas...
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative,
I liked it all, but most of all I liked the fact that although the play was entirely focused on Quintana there were, five evenings and two afternoons a week, these ninety full minutes, the run time of...
I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself seems increasingly obscure.
As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame. Onl...
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
Some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.
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.
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that worked on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assigna...
She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping card.
Or amended and saved at 1:08 p.m. that afternoon
Anise tea. Meditation turns us on, Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers.
You talk crazy any more and I'll leave.Leave. For Christ's sake leave.She would not take her eyes from the dry wash. All right.Don't, he would say then. Don't. Why do you say those things. Why do you...
You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.
You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing — beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code — what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what evil....
You couldn't pay for her hats,' her father, a ship's captain, had told her suitors by way of discouragement, and perhaps they had all been discouraged but my grandfather, an innocent from the Georgeto...
Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go.
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.
We went to get away from ourselves, and the way to do that is to drive, down through Nogales some day when the pretty green places pall and all that will move the imagination is some place difficult,...
We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn...