I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

I had decided that it is the fate of my generation never to have known the noble law of the sea, and to live, instead, in an era when the captain leaves his ship not...

All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it,...

A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.

What happens slowly carries in each part the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden, irreversible. It means this: no going back.

My aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training died long ago, as a teenager, on a white-knuckled ferry ride to Elba during a torrential rainstorm [Kushner, Rachel, Diary, London Review of Books,...

Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste.

If your parents died suddenly, Sandro understood, your home was wherever you were, and now you were from nowhere. Your parents were your provenance. Dead, you had no provenance.

There’s an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl’s dreaming. They aren’t real. They aren’t the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station,...

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.