I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms withthe people we used to be, whether we find them attractivecompany or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced andsurprise us, come hammering on t...
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 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.
I have already lost touch with a couple people I used to be.
I did that on purpose,' Lucille Miller told Erwin Sprengle later, 'to save myself from letting my heart do something crazy.
Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?
Death, he wrote, so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.
By now the sky outside is the color of his marble, but they are all reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time...
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...
Think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense, C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought aft...
Sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an emp...
Recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred,
Death of a parent, he wrote, despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had...
Confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred,
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.
[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
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 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...
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.