They hope they’ll learn to be happier together. They also yearn, sometimes, for the point at which misery becomes so profound as to leave them no alternative.
These spasms of emotion take himconstantly. A song can do it; even the sight of an old dog. They pass. They usually pass. This time,though, tears start falling from his eyes almost before he knows it...
There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dime...
She thinks how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensi...
She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room....
She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.
She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
Right now she is reading Virginia Woolf, all of Virginia Woolf, book by book-She is fascinated by the idea of a woman like that, a woman of such brilliance, such strangeness, such immeasurable sorrow;...
Outside the house is a world where the shelves are stocked, where radio waves are full of music, where young men walk the streets again, men who have deprievation and a fear worse than death, who have...
Martha’s Vineyard had fossil deposits one million centuries old. The northern reach of Cape Cod, however, on which my house sat, the land I inhabited—that long curving spit of shrub and dune that curv...
Man, he said, I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want.What do we want? I asked blurrily.Aw, man, you know, he said. We just want, we...
It's stores, it's the whole thing, all that shit everywhere, 'scuse me, that merchandise, all those goods, and ads screaming at you from all over the place, buy buy buy buy buy, and when somebody come...
It seems that she can survive, she can prosper, if she has London around her.
In heaven, Lucas would be beautiful. He’d speak a language everyone understood.
In a sense Provincetown is a beach. If you stand on the shore watching the tide recede, you are merely that much closer to the water and that much more available to weather than you would be in the mi...
If I die tomorrow, Provincetown is where I’d want my ashes scattered. Who knows why we fall in love, with places or people, with objects or ideas? Thirty centuries of literature haven’t begun to solve...
I know you. I've seen it. And, knowing all, I release you.
Heaven winked at you, right? Maybe. Maybe it did. Or maybe it was just an airplane and a cloud. But if heaven winks at anybody, it's probably the less-than-conspicious seekers; the ones who choose the...
He believes that a real work of art can be owned but should not be subject to capture; that it should radiate such authority, such bizarre but confident beauty (or unbeauty) that it can't be undone by...