Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.
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...
For forty years I saw myself thru John's eyes. I did not age.
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.
En épocas difíciles, me habían dicho desde niña, lee, aprende, prepárate, recurre a la literatura.
Doliul se dovedește a fi un loc pe care îl cunoaștem doar atunci când ajungem la el. [...] Nu putem ști dinainte despre faptul nesfârșitei absente care urmează (și aici stă esența deosebirii între dol...
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...
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...
At a point during the summer it occurred to me that I had no letters from John, not one. We had only rarely been far or long apart.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
After Princeton, the years seem like a blur, but the days seem more like rapid fire. - Donald Rumsfeld in Year of Magical Thinking
Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wan...
Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean love in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love...
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.)
Lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced m...
Both schoolteachers and both dedicated to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, whose members observe the Sabbath on Saturday, believe in an apocalyptic Second Coming, have a strong missionary tendency, a...
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked...
One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.
More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child’s primer, that t...