What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.
We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum,...
Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
The center was not holding.
Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.
Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.
Just an ordinary day. And then—gone.
Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her...
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.
I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee w...
I was cold because nothing in my body was working as it should.
I know what nothing means, and keep on playing.
I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.
I am what I am. To look for reasons is beside the point.
I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I...
Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voice
I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.
What we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention.
One more piece of evidence that assigned reading makes nothing happen.
Why make this call and not just say what you wanted?His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.