I have been looking all my life for history and have yet to find it.
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing...
What we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention.
Tell me what matters, BZ said.Nothing, Maria said.
Raised to believe that her life would be, as her great-grandmother's was said to have been, one ceaseless round of fixed and settled principles, aims, motives, and activity, she could sometimes think...
Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.
Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
In theory momentos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it w...
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
For forty years I saw myself thru John's eyes. I did not age.
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead...
Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?
Ten watercolors were made from that star.
Misinformation about rattlesnakes is a leitmotiv of the insomniac imagination in Los Angeles.
Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.
I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.
He ran his fingers over the moist ends of her hair and across her face. Her eyes were wet. How many nights had he heard Lily crying. As some parents sleep through fire, thunderstorms, and voices at t...
It kills me when people talk about California hedonism. Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.
Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.