A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It’s in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.

The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game...

this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood” “Normal Time” in New California Writing

If I was set an essay on Friday, I’d spend three hours on Saturday morning in the library. Was that normal? I didn’t know. What I did know was that I felt less prone to...

Our family was nearly torn apart on several occasions by arguments started when the refrigerator door was open for what my father deemed as ‘too long.

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, ‘I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,’ the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the...

I make them up,’ I tell them. ‘Out of my head.

[Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let’s buy it what a bargain!

The first way not to shake hands is executed by receiving someone’s hand in yours and proceeding to squeeze it tightly, hurting the other party as if they were responsible for a past death in...

Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the...

You have to make choices even when there is nothing to choose from.

Que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de même voir que c’est notre vénération devant ce qui a été déjà fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit,...

Ever since the robot was first invented, there have been people who swear up and down that this marks the first step towards the fall of man … To be fair, their arguments are backed...

Perhaps talk of counters turned the boy’s thoughts to his father’s glove shop. His father would have accounted for all his transactions using the tokens. They were hard and round and very thin, made of...

El amor de un ser humano por otro, es posiblemente la prueba más difícil para cada uno de nosotros.

Convençuts que llibertat sense Socialisme és privilegi i injustícia i que Socialisme sense llibertat és esclavitud i brutalitat.

[The cats] scamper in front of my legs, causing me to fall and face plant into whatever furniture is closest. They especially like to play this game when I’m carrying piping hot coffee.

It’s the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim

Never say more than is necessary.

New Rule: You don’t have to teach both sides of a debate if one side is a load of crap. President Bush recently suggested that public schools should teach “intelligent design” alongside the theory of...

After all, this was the place where I’d had my first meaningful conversation with a female, it was the site of a football’s first encounter with my groin, and above all, it was the location...

Everything around me affirmed there was nothing else I could do – yet everything inside me cried that I was not doing enough.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd...

The world, full of past sound, would be like the sky, full of past light. The world would be like the mind, for which there is no once.

After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree.

On less lucid evenings, every library is a haunted cemetery.

Even ivory towers need central heating.

A lifelong movie I already knew the ending to

The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done...

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

I avoided one-on-one situations, eye contact, and healthy relationships. Instead I took refuge in drinking too much, cheap sex, and sarcasm.

And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so...

For I have nothing to lean on, nowhere to call my home and there is nowhere I will go for Christmas to rest my head and touch familiar walls. I have no degree to show...

La imagen de la biblioteca como refugio en donde se repliega la afectividad de Juana Inés y se despliega su actividad mental, ha de completarse con otra, que toca a la voluntad y al carácter:...

I smelled war on the horizon, with more deaths and trouble to come” Bombing of the Twin TowersFrom Rape of a Nation by Sara Niles

[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

Claim whatever you want. Say you only want a happy family or a successful career or a big house. I say: no, that’s not what you want. You’ll settle for those things, but you really...