Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.

…the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my...

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

…some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.

their suburbia house in Brentwood” was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children...

I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.

Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep...

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be where no storms come.

I put the word “diagnosis” in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a “diagnosis” led to a “cure,” or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore...

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it…We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool...

I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I...

The ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry. I would still...

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs…The way...

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.

I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas...

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it...

I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly.

I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come...

I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not...

Everything’s going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would...

What these men represented was not ‘The West’ but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one...

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it...

Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

…nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.

Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.

I used to tell John my dreams, not to understand them but to get rid of them, clear my mind for the day.

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel

Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested – ask any doctor – that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of...

I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all...

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree….Those of us less...