It’s a terrible thing, to lie. It’s a field you keep seeding and watering and plowing, but nothing will ever grow on it. She
It was astounding how a woman, when she struck marital gold, procured not just a new wardrobe and new friends but a new voice straight out of a 1930s gramophone (brittle, mono-stereo) and a vocabulary...
It felt as if we'd been to war together. Deep in a jungle, alone, I had relied on them, these strangers. They'd held me up in ways only people could. When it was over, an ending never felt like an end...
I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable,...
For the record, there were no framed pictures of me around our house, and the only class portrait Dad had ever ordered was the one from Sparta Elementary in which I'd sat, knees glued together, in fro...
Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not.
Dad's romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).
Dad on Child-rearing: There's no education superior to travel. Think of The Motorcycle Diaries, or what Montrose St. Millet wrote in Ages of Exploration: 'To be still is to be stupid. To be stupid is...
Could something be real when all evidence of it was gone? Was something categorically true if it lived on only in your head, same as your dreams?
But that was how it went sometimes, the English language, when you really needed it, crumbled to clay in your mouth.
And so fleas look up at the sky and wonder .
America's greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism, not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which s...
Watching a midforties Wonder Woman stumble backward into Hannah's net stack of Traveler magazines made me wonder if the very idea of Growing Up was a sham, the bus out of town you're so busy waiting f...
The boring relative everyone ignores—no one calls, no one writes—until they need a serious .
You know what Confucius said?Remind me.Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves
Today dies a crooked and gluttonus man' - it was true, at least literally; McCullough allegedly weighed three hundred pounds and suffered from scoliosis.
The mountains hugged each other sternly, similar to the way men hugged other men, not letting their chests touch. Thin clouds hung around their necks, and the mountains farthest away, the ones passed...
The late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist, and social observer, wrote in his autobiographical Appointments, 1890-1901 (1902), When one travels abroad, one d...
The bad things that happen to you don’t have to mean anything at all. -Nora Halliday
That was women for you -- always morphing. One minute they were helpless, needing shelter and English muffins, the next they were ruthlessly bending you to their will like you were a piece of sheet me...