During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, th...
They don’t commit suicide. They don’t weep. But they can and do fall to pieces. They can and do have their hearts broken. They can and do lose their minds.
Another memory. She walks into the kitchen, sits down at the kitchen counter with me, and says, I just got a very interesting phone call. It was some guy who said he was doing a survey for the Maidenf...
Why do I think you did it?Because you were trapped upside down in a tankful of water.Because you were weak and in pain.Because you were tired of fighting.
Wouldn’t it be easier if we just named all the cats Password?
Socrates to Phaedrus: I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything.)
At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child' (109).
They hold each other tightly for a few moments as the dog, a miniature dachshund, barks and leaps at them.
Cell phones do not belong in fiction, an editor once scolded in the margin of one of my manuscripts, and ever since - more than two decades now - I have wondered at the disconnect between tech-filled...
Because it’s all about the rhythm, you said. Good sentences start with a beat.
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. (quoting Doris Lessing)
She indulged his long-winded Tolstoy bashing (he saw Tolstoy, in no way equal to Dostoevsky, as a kind of highbrow Margaret Mitchell who had helped prepare the way for socialist realism)
If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.
Is this the madness at the heart of it? Do I believe that if I am good to him, if I act selflessly and make sacrifices for him, do I believe that if I love Apollo - beautiful, aging, melancholy Apollo...
I Am the Architect of My Own Destiny,
Here are more lines from The Great Gatsby. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no on...
Graffiti on Philosophy Hall: The examined life ain’t worth it either.
Once again I come upon his famous definition of love: two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other.
I know this is all moronically anthropomorphic, but sometimes that is the form love takes.
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something h...
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