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 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 why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead...
I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.
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, 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...
Can you evade the dying of the brightness?Or do you evade only its warning?Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?
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....
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...
The contemporary trend was to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.
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,
Only upset mentally but are all unbalanced physically. No matter how calm and controlled they seemingly may be, no one can under such circumstances be normal. Their disturbed circulation makes them co...
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,
Because in at least one respect California—the California we are talking about—resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perv...
Because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nig...
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 increasingly justify such heightened involvement with our children as essential to their survival. We keep them on speed dial. We watch them on Skype. We track their movements. We expect every call...
We had gone with David and Jean Halberstam to see the Lakers play the Knicks. David had gotten seats through the commissioner of the NBA, David Stern. The Lakers won. Rain had been sluicing down the g...