I’d no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential—I was torn between the two.
It kept Mom on high alert and I worried sometimes that their marriage had become the sort Inspector Javert might have had with Jean Valjean.
I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?
Baby, high school's over. High school's never over..
At twenty-two, I had the callowest possible definition of interesting and, by the measure of my own calipers, was far from interesting myself.
You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.
What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn’t have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.
We call them feelings because we feel them. They don't start in our minds, they arise in our bodies...
Tryptophan: a chemical in turkey meat rumored to make you sleepy and careless. One of the many minefields in the landscape of the family Thanksgiving.
The sunset you see is always better than the one you don't. More stars are always better than less.
The dogs came racing up the stairs. They danced at Rima's feet, frantic with the need to communicate something to her. Little Timmy's down the well! Feed us ice cream and potato chips! Sometimes there...
Our parents met at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona at a high school summer science camp. I'd come to see the heavens, our father always said. But the stars were in her eyes, a line that used to plea...
One morning I was bicycling to class when a large flock of Canada geese passed overhead. I couldn't see them, or much of anything else, but I heard the jazzy honking.
Once, he’d dreamed of experimental fusions, that he would be the one to merge folk harps with anime. Now he saw the incommensurability. In his own words: matter and antimatter. The end of the world.
My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker chip.
In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not write a paper on Julius Caesar entirely in iambic pentame...
I'm unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through.
I read a postelection blog post by the great Ursula K. Le Guin that said that we should stop using the metaphors of war. We should not think in terms of enemies and battles, because such thoughts, in...
An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.
An election year in the U.S., as if you needed to be reminded, the vituperative tunes of the Ayn Rand Marching Band bleating from the airwaves.