Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
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...
But perhaps it is presumptuous of me to assume that they will be missing something. Perhaps in retrospect this has been a story not about Sacramento at all, but about the things we lose and the promis...
Bringing him back had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. Seeing it clearly did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he w...
Always when I play back my father’s voice, Maria says, it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one o...
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.)
The most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes.
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,
Pupils were fixed in the position of wide black dilatation that signifies brain death, and obviously would never respond to light again.
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...
[from On Keeping a Notebook]: It is a good idea to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about…I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the peop...
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...
Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone. After