I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.
I know what the fear is.The fear is not for what is lost.What is lost is already in the wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to be lost.
I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen.
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...
As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed comm...
Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.
Try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I’m not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the gam...
We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum.
We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées. We are talking about something priva...
Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty, Philippe Ariès wrote to the...
Time passes. Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.
This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but...
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.
The devastation along the Gulf had an inevitability about it: the coast was reverting to its natural state.
She never puts on any weight, you’ll notice that’s often true of selfish women.
Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.
One of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes.
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.