Stop searching. Face the earth where you can. Literally speaking, it’s all you have to go on.
Meeting a girl, falling in love, marrying her, moving to Connecticut, buying a fucking house, starting a life with her and thinking you really knew anything about her--the last part was a complete fic...
Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things.
It was on such a night as this that the unhappy things came about.
I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history’s continuum, just two people afloat...
I knew you could know the words but not match them with the life. But to be able to do it right said something about you. And I didn’t know if my judgment was good enough, or exactly what was good or...
He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don't remember him ever smiling at me that way again.
Athletes, by and large, are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do. As a result, when you talk to an athlete, as I do all the time in locker rooms, in hotel...
At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from stars.
When you’re young your opponent is the future; but when you’re not young, your opponent’s the past and everything you’ve done in it and the problem of getting away from it.
What I know is, you have a better chance in life-of surviving it-if you tolerate loss well;manage not to be a cynic through it all;...to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good...
Though possibly it–the answer–is simple: it is just low-life, some coldness in us all, some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain, makes our existence seem like a...
Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.
The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became—like a long proof in mathematics in which the...
Our ex-wifes always harbour secrets about us that make them irresistable. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.
No words came out of me. Words can also be the feeblest emissaries for our feelings.
Just exactly what that good life was--the one I expected--I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between.
It’s odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that’s lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they’re otherwise neither.
It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Ev...
I had more positive views. Which made me feel that although I hadn't been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with othe...