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.
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...
The second kind of grief was complicated grief, which was also known in the literature as pathological bereavement and was said to occur in a variety of situations. One situation in which pathological...
The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new ethical duty t...
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.
One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an eighty-foot sign which blinks stardust or caesar’s palace. Yes, but what does that explain? This geographical implausi...
Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach... I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and mak...
Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? . . . It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpred...
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...
Let me just be in the ground.Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.
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 is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I can...
It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag.
In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment.In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.How inadequately I appreciated the moment when...
In fact I had no idea how to be a wife.
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...
If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die?
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative,
I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I’m not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the g...