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.
There is no one there to see it. The world is doing what it always does, demonstrating itself to itself. The world has no interest in the little figures that come and go, the phantoms that worry and w...
There are two of you now. Neither is sufficient unto itself, but you learn, over time, to join your two halves together, and hobble around. There are limits to what you can do, though you’re able to g...
Suddenly the door to one of the trailers opens, and a famous head emerges. It is a woman’s head, quite a distance away, seen in profile, like the head on a coin, and while Clarissa cannot immediately...
She, Laura, likes to imagine (it's one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar h...
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 is not given to fawning over celebrities, no more than most people, but can't help being drawn to the aura of fame—and more than fame, actual immortality— implied by the presence of a movie star i...
She doesn't really want to go far, she just wants the solitude, the public solitude, of the street; the un-company of passing strangers, no one embracing her, no one looking with compassion and wonder...
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;...
One error at the beginning is quite likely just that.
Morning, Peter, she callsfrom the back, in her exaggerated German accent. Mawning, Pedder.She’s been in the States more than fifteen years now, but heraccent has gotten heavier. Uta is a member of wha...
It’s your life, quite possibly your only one. Still you find yourself having a vodka at three a.m., waiting for your pill to kick in, with time ticking through you and your own ghost already wandering...
It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a w...
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...