No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely.
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant re-arrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
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...
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...
I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are gettin...
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...
Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who h...
Everyone was younger then, and in the telling a certain glow suffuses those years.
Doliul e diferit. Doliul nu știe ce-i distanța. Durerea vine în valuri, paroxisme, revelații subite care-ți taie genunchii, îți iau vederea și îți tulbură curgerea zilelor.
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...
The most beautiful things I had ever seen had all been seen from airplanes.
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...
Perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is trouble...
[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 had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change.
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
When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which w...
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 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, for better or for worse, ourselv...