It is the phenomenon somethings called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in s...
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to thespecific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then andfor that matter have known since,...
In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indi...
In fact I no longer value this kind of memento.I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until...
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 need you to write something down, he said. It was, he said, for his new book, not for mine, a point he stressed because I was at the time researching a book that involved sports...When I gave him th...
I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and...
I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emot...
I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a wa...
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 do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree....Those of us less incline...
I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, di...
Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs. Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, kn...
Because I had been tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too often frightened of migraine and failure and the days getting shorter,
At least some of the time, the world appears to me as a painting by Hieronymous Bosch; were I to follow my conscience then, it would lead me out onto the desert with Marion Faye, out to where he stood...
As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come t...
All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.