Memories are what you no longer want to remember.
Marriage is the classic betrayal
Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.
I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do.
I was cold because nothing in my body was working as it should.
Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire...
1966 and 1968 were a world removed from each other in the political and cultural life of the United States . . .
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their bes...
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.
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.
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
Unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up w...
One of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties,
Occult enchantment, from that febrile complex of resentments and revenges and idealizations and taboos which renders exile so potent an organizing principle.
It is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built The Breakers he damned himself.
You’re a professional. Finish the piece. It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.