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...
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...
Sonora
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.
Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pre...
She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her mor...
She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her,
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...
Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look right to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley...
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?
Nor does he understand that when we talk about sale-leasebacks and right-of-way condemnations we are talking in code about the things we like best, the yellow fields and the cottonwoods and the rivers...
No one who has ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of a...
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.
Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder.
It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone’s memory is no true memory at all but only the traces...
In the popular imagination, the American motion-picture industry still represents a kind of mechanical monster, programmed to stifle and destroy all that is interesting and worthwhile and creative in...
I'm not optimistic, darling, but I'm hopeful. There's a difference. I'm hopeful.