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.
In just such self-doubts do small towns lose their character.
In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully...
I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night.Only shifts.Only waiting.
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.
I offer you a second way of approaching the moment where everything in your life just stops, this one from the actor Robert Duvall: I exist very nicely between the words 'action' and 'cut.'And even a...
I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I a...
I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.
Huey Newton laid down his life for us, Stokely Carmichael had said the same night. But of course Huey Newton had not yet laid down his life at all, was just here in the Alameda County Jail waiting to...
How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything obse...
Her choices, all.Sentimental choices, things she remembered.I remembered them too.
He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to...
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow suc...
Grammar is a piano I play by ear.
Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen.
Emergency, I continue to believe, is what happens to someone else.I say that I continue to believe this even as I know that I do not.
Do you know who is the first eternal spaceman of this universe? The first to send his wild wild vibrations to all those cosmic superstations? For the song he always shouts sends the planets flipping o...
But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whi...