Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persis...
She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you.
For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities. It is the product not of the boomer...
A daughter at home resting up from her husband--who is apparently a head of some sort, one of the Berkeley Street People, a People's Park maker, a drop-out and a cop-out whose aim is to remake the wor...
Intellectual hare
To belong to a clan, to a tight group of people allied by blood and loyalties and the mutual ownership of closeted skeletons. To see the family vices and virtues in a dozen avatars instead of in two o...
Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head, and that the rewards—...
Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything - though it might have been a good thing if he'd also taught her to question the act of questioning.
She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.
Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcy...
It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don't need, endurance is what I need. I h...
If I had kept a journal, I could go back through it and check up on what memory reports plausibly but not necessarily truly. But keeping a journal then would have been like making notes while going ov...
His mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes.
Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and may never hear from, who perhaps do not even exist except in your hopes? Why spend ten y...
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and ever...
Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.
So what happened when base desires and unworthy passions troubled the flesh of men and women inhibited from casual promiscuity, adultery, and divorce that keep us so healthy?
Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn’t differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to ou...