Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.
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 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 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 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...
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
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.
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.
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better...
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.
But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket line...
Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we...
Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss.
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...
Although the knowledge that their friends love them and sorrow for them is a great solace, the nearest afflicted must be protected from any one or anything which is likely to overstrain nerves already...
After that he would leave for a while, breaking things as he went, slamming doors to kick them open, picking up decanters to hurl at mirrors, detouring by way of chairs to smash them against the floor...
Adoption, I was to learn although not immediately, is hard to get right.As a concept, even what was then its most widely approved narrative carried bad news: if someone chose you, what does that tell...