Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
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...
In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside.
In New Orleans they have mastered the art of the motionless. In
I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.
I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O’Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O’Keeffe ‘Sky Above Clouds’ canvases...
He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them
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.
All one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and d...
The revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.
I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering o...
The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
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...
Their suburbia house in Brentwood was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all chi...
Prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them,...
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.
You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.
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...
The genuflection toward 'fairness' is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a...
The fear is for what is still to be lost.