When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.
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...
We closed the deal and moved to New York.Where in fact I had lived before, from the time I was twenty-one and just out of the English Department at Berkeley and starting work at Vogue (a segue so prof...
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...
To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in...
To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in f...
This process, one of trading the state to outside owners in exchange for their (it now seems) entirely temporary agreement to enrich us, in toher words the pauperization of California, had in fact beg...
This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fort...
They come from all over, and they are on the average very young, very earnest, and not very much in touch with the larger scene, less refugees from it than children who do not quite apprehend it.
These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers...
There could be no snake in Quntana Roo's garden.Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.
The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal.
The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted.
The notion of general devastation had for Maria a certain sedative effect (the rattlesnake in the playpen, that was different, that was particular, that was punitive), suggested an instant in which al...
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people, she said. The hardest is with one.
That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life...
Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark...
Some women fight and others do not. Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O’Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fai...
Some time later there was a song on all the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me, and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know n...
Some men (fewer women) are solitary, unattached to any particular place or institution, most comfortable not exactly alone but in the presence of strangers.