What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
Just an ordinary day. And then—gone.
[P]eople with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.
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.
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
Time is the school in which we learn.
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.
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....
The death of a parent, he wrote, 'despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we...
I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
Aging and its evidence remain life's most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.
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...
Once she was born, I was never not afraid.
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself.
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...
I was cold because nothing in my body was working as it should.