I suppose everything had changed and nothing had.
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.
Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it but that it is a moral imperative that we have it....
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...
To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.
The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.
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...
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...
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.
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...
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’s not you. It’s anyone. Sometimes I don’t want anyone around. Some afternoons I lie on my bed and the light comes through the shutters on the floor and I think I never want to leave my own room.
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...
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...
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 did that on purpose,' Lucille Miller told Erwin Sprengle later, 'to save myself from letting my heart do something crazy.
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.