There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden.Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.
The day's events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, th...
The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.
That Episcopal day school Marin attended from the age of four until she entered Berkeley had as its aim the development of a realistic but optimistic attitude, and it was characteristic of Charlotte t...
Philippe Ariès, in a series of lectures he delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1973 and later published as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, noted that beginning about 193...
Perhaps most strikingly of all, it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon tho...
One question: would you have called buying pastel linen dresses for Saigon a mark of 'privilege'? Or would you have called it more a mark of bone stupidity?
Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there...
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself; Nathanael We...
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 whe...
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 just such self-doubts do small towns lose their character.
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 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 smooth out the snapshot and look into his face, and do and do not see my own.
I remember wishing that I could afford the house, which cost $ 1,000 a month. Someday you will, she said lazily. Someday it all comes. There in the sun on her terrace it seemed easy to believe in some...
I remember swimming (albeit nervously, for I was a nervous child, afraid of sinkholes and afraid of snakes, and perhaps that was the beginning of my error)
I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three...
I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.