don't see what this has to do with us." I say back, "Does everything have to be about you? Can you not project yourself outside yourself? Can you not take on another's life for your own benefit?

...to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...

First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.

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.

He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.

It's hard to go through life without killing someone.

...good counsel: generosity, longevity, acceptance, relinquishment, letting the world come to me -- and, with these things to make a life.

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...

My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.

Probably many people's vision of "thinking something through" is of this nature: you do precisely what youwant to do-if you can.

How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of...

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...

Most things dopn't stay the way they are very long.

Against these forces -- an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving -- time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance, and should.

It was as if I'd already left some time before and was just catching up with myself.

She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.

It was as if they'd discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems...

In their faces--plenty of them were handsome, but ruined--I've seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

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....

Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

Loneliness, I've read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it's promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead...

She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.

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...

Most things don't stay the way they are very long.

He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they're substantial, that they're not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.

Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.

You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.