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...
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. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobster...
It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.In some ways it was the conventional clandestin...
It is three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and 105° and the air so thick with smog that the dusty palm trees loom up with a sudden and rather attractive mystery.
It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know ho...
I promised myself that I would maintain momentum.Maintain momentum was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown.In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it.In fact I had no idea what i...
I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasing distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, h...
Discussion of how California has 'changed,' then, tends locally to define the more ideal California as that which existed at whatever past point the speaker first saw it: Gilroy as it was in the 1960s...
De ce trebuie să ai mereu dreptate, îmi spunea el. N-a înțeles vreodată că în mintea mea n-aveam niciodată dreptate.
By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other.
August comes on not like a month but like an affliction.
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...The way I writ...
And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, I no longer fight it. I lie down and let it happen. At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain co...
Across the road at the Faith Community Church a couple of dozen old people, come here to live in trailers and die in the sun, are holding a prayer sing. I cannot hear them and do not want to. What I c...
A certe latitudini c’è un arco di tempo che precede e segue il solstizio d’estate, poche settimane appena, in cui il crepuscolo diventa lungo e azzurro. [...] Passi davanti a una vetrina, t’incammini...
About Georgia O'Keeffe:) 'The city men.' 'The men.' 'They.' The words crop up again and again as this astonishingly aggressive woman tells us what was on her mind when she was making her astonishingly...
About Georgia O'Keeffe) At the Art Students League in New York one of her fellow students advised her that, since he would be a great painter and she would end up teaching painting in a girs' school,...
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...