I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.
This sense that the world can be reinvented [evokes] the Sixties in this country, those years when no one at all seemed to have any memory or mooring...
I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life.
Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it.
Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we w...
How could this have happened when everything was normal?
Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
The child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.
We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression....
I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.
I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually fe...
Of course great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service.
Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life--both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections--have all va...
I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.
Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.
So hot that August comes on not like a month but like an affliction;
De fiecare dată aceste rugăminți pentru prezența lui nu au făcut decât să-mi întărească conștiința tăcerii definitive care ne-a despărțit.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be where no storms come.