To watch boxing closely, and seriously, is to risk moments of what might be called animal panic—a sense not only that something very ugly is happening but that, by watching it, one is an accomplice. T...
The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!
She would become, through the years, a woman who expected the worst, to relieve herself of the anxiety of hope. She would become a woman of calm, fatalistic principles, anticipating her life with the...
Of all miracles, none is more daunting than normal. To be—to become—normal. This gift seemingly so ordinary is not a gift given to all who seek it.
Nothing is more lonely than fucking ‘good works.
My crappy-kid's life. It was mostly a shitty life wasn't it, OK but I miss it.
Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to outlive them—for to be a daughter without p...
Jammed together at lunch. Not a drinker, nevertheless I experience a distinct alteration of consciousness in the presence of others—socially, but even in the classroom or seminar—a heightening, liveni...
If marriage is a masquerade, there is the very real danger that masks may slip. The
I could wish that I had recourse to the Prince of Darkness & his quick ways of revenge;
Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.
Her long periods of intense concentration began to be punctuated by bouts of directionless daydreaming, sudden explosions of feeling. At such times Shakespeare was too dangerous to be read closely—Ham...
Exotic: meaning you're desired.For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness.So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.
Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we mus...
During these mad dashes to the wall phone in the kitchen she hadn't time to fall but with fantastical grace and dexterity wrenched herself upright in midfall and continued running (dogs whimpering, ya...
But you are a solace just by existing, vividly in my thoughts if not here before me.
Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.
A familiar story, Marya instructs herself—a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn’t a soul of her own.
You're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary o...
The terrible intimacy of pregnancy,