The fairest state of them all, this tranquil and beloved domain—what has it now become? A nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw o...
Remember. Oh, remember. How remember moments of forgotten time? Where is the way now (she wondered) through that dark up-spreading wood? Leaf, locust, sunlight in the hollow, all those she had known,...
Neath cold sand I dreamed of death / but woke at dawn to see / in glory, the bright, the morning star.
Most people in the midst of disaster have yet one hope that lingers on some misty horizon—the possibility of love, money coming, the assurance that time cures all hurts, no matter how painful. But Lof...
Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
Höss was hardly a sadist, nor was he a violent man or even particularly menacing. He might even be said to have possessed a serviceable decency. Indeed,
But I did not write any such letter that evening. Because when I returned to the house I encountered Sophie in the flesh for the first time and fell, if not instantaneously, then swiftly and fathomles...
More often than not the person one loves from whom one withholds the most searing truths about one’s self, if only out of the very human motive to spare groundless pain. But
Sophie slept, understanding with a dreamer’s fierce clarity that she was doomed.
O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles...
Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression—in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.
If there are Jews in this group, you have no right to live more than two weeks.’ Then he said, ‘Any nuns here? Like the priests, you have one month. All the rest, three months.
If I am no longer able to function with you, it is, you understand, due to no lack of virility but because almost everything about you, especially your body, leaves me totally without sensation... I
I reckon even you didn’t know the actual statistics, hiding out until now like you done. But in the three days and nights that your campaign lasted you managed to hasten fifty-five white people into e...
I never said I hated the Marine Corps! I only said it was no place for a sensitive, civilized, self-respecting human being.
I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought th...
Doctor, I will be as direct with you as I can. I have long and do still steadfastly believe that slavery is the great cause of all the chief evils of our land. It is a cancer eating at our bowels, the...
But my behavior was really the result of the illness, which had progressed far enough to produce some of its most famous and sinister hallmarks: confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memory.
But I could tell from the way his muscles become stiff and this trembling that ran through him that he was finished with me. Even so I couldn’t stop.
And then I blurted some words that a lifetime of general equilibrium, and a smug belief in the impregnability of my psychic health, had prevented me from believing I could ever utter; I was chilled as...