Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters...
Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.
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.
August comes on not like a month but like an affliction.
Tell me, a rabbi asked Daniel Bell when he said, as a child, that he did not believe in God. Do you think God cares?)
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...
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.
Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.
We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we w...
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 tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the mult...
We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.
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...
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,...
Vanish.Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.Go back into the blue.I myself placed her ashes in the wall.I myself saw the ca...
To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one ev...
There is an airport in Hermosillo, and Hermosillo is only eighty-five miles about Guaymas, but to fly is to miss the point. The point is to become disoriented, shriven, by the heat and the deceptive p...
There he was, he had kept saying later. He was alive and then he was dead and we were watching. We saw him at the instant it happened we knew he was dead before his family did.Just an ordinary day. 'A...