In New York one lives in the moment rather more than Socrates advised, so that at a party or alone in your room it will always be difficult to guess at the long term worth of anything.

God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle—or instruction.

I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense.

It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.

Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one's head.

I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off.

Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been

Death and I are head to head in a total collision, pure and mutual distaste.

Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not.

I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound." - Carol Kennicott

Giving when you can is generosity. Giving when you can't is sacrifice.

Cincinnati needs to take notes from Houston. Houston fans are among the top five fans in the game.

People need help, advice and love, not websites telling you how to lose your last pound, or scantily clad, deeply anorexic celebrities parading around flaunting their golden bones.

Every journey is played out between standstill and flight.

The gem cannot be polished without friction nor man without trials.

We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that.

When I go home to England, my friends all make fun of me for sounding American.

Conceit is incompatible with understanding.

The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.