As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs.
See the question now as the equivalent of a cry of helpless rage, another way of saying How could this have happened when everything was normal.
It is a network kept alive by people whose instincts tell them that if they do not keep moving at night on the desert they will lose all reason.
If someone chose you, what does that tell you? Doesn’t it tell you that you were available to be chosen? Doesn’t it tell you, in the end, that there are only two people in the world? The one who chose...
Here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments...
Confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended o...
Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers?
Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then w...
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to...
Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the uncon...
When I saw the photograph I realized for the first time why the obituaries had so disturbed me.I had allowed other people to think he was dead.I had allowed him to be buried alive.
What seemed novel about the use of focus groups in the 1992 campaign was the increasingly narrow part of the population to which either party was interested in listening, and the extent to which this...
What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real...
What I can hear are occasional coyotes and a constant chorus of Baby the Rain Must Fall from the jukebox in the Snake Room next door, and if I were also to hear those dying voices, those Midwestern vo...
We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children. On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings w...
We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are be definition more interesting that ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing ... Only the very young a...
We all have our own trips and it is a nice drive.
To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.
To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone oppressed to break them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not mak...
To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trust...