Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy. That is not a remarkable thing to say, b...
Time is the school in which we learn.
The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution… In theory, these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment whe...
The center was not holding.
That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one’s memory.
Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is twenty-three, was raised in Virginia, and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. I feel it’s insane, he says, and his voice drops. This c...
Somewhere between the Yolo Causeway and Vallejo it occurred to me that during the course of any given week I met too many people who spoke favorably about bombing power stations.
Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.Information is control.
Just an ordinary day. And then—gone.
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...
I just can’t get that monster out of my mind.
I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later...
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
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...
There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel
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,...