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...
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...
They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words - words are for typeheads, Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego tr...
The search for conspiracy, Anthony Lewis had written in The New York Times in September of 1975, only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country. It romanticizes crim...
The mourner is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness…. To put my conclusion more precisely: I should say that in mourning...
The difference was that all through those eight months I had been trying to substitute an alternate reel. Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star.
Particularly out here tonight, in this country so ominous and terrible that to live in it is to live with antimatter, it is difficult to believe that the good is a knowable quantity.
Out under the pepper trees the boys from the Mexican crew sat around sucking caramels, and down the road some of the technical men sat around a place which served a stuffed lobster and a glass of tequ...
Of course we would all like to believe in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home...
Not since Mr. Kaiser, they would say, as if the construction of the Hawaiian Village Hotel on a few acres of reclaimed tidal flat near Fort De Russy had in one swing of the builder’s crane wiped out t...
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. Although the knowledge that their friends love them and sorrow...
No one could have missed the reservoir of self-pity, the quickness to blame, the narrowing of the eyes, as if in wildlife documentary, when things did not go his [Clinton] way. That famous tendency of...
Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fre...
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignati...
Memory fades, memory adjusts , memory conforms to what we think we remember.
Marxism in this country had even been an eccentric and quixotic passion. One oppressed class after another had seemed finally to miss the point. The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having....
Madness, it became convenient to believe quite early on, came with the territory, on the order of earthquakes.
Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon.