As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive. Family and friends know, after long years of wearying experience, that the fixture list always ha...
...it was one of the best meals we ever ate. Perhaps that is because it was the first conscious one, for me at least; but the fact that we remember it with such queer clarity must mean that it had other reasons for being important. I suppose that hap...
I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in and ask for a buttered biscuit or something and my mother, impatiently, would tell them no. But...
Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed b...
Occasionally, events in one's life become clearer through the prism of experience, a phrase which simply means that things tend to be clearer as time goes on. For instance, when a person is just born, they usually have no idea what curtains are and s...
People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics ...
What the hell’s the matter with you men? Are you cowards as well as stupid? You boys make me sick. I’m done with you. You hear me? I want you to go back to your places now and stay with your children until I say you’re needed. “Tell your wive...
Camus-boy, you're always going to be the same you, just older. It's not like there's a moment when you wake up and go, ' I don't tell him, but this is the scariest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Being grown-up feel like a big transition. I...
I could not have desired her enough. She was a living soul and could be loved forever. Like every living creature, she carried in her the presence of eternity. That was why, as she grew older, I saw in her always the child she had been, and why, look...
I am a lonely man," he said again that evening. "And is it not possible that you are also a lonely person? But I am an older man, and I can live with my loneliness, quietly. You are young, and it must be difficult to accept your loneliness. You must ...
What were you going to make for Christmas dinner?” one of my older children asked in a very reasonable tone. I cleared my throat, but couldn’t speak. There was no real explanation for my behavior. I’d been so intent on getting through this firs...
When I was maybe five or six years old, a woman down the street...got flattened by a train. When I got older I realized it probably wasn't an accident. It was a late train and she was so sick and swollen with age she could barely move, so what the he...
The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're do...
There were upsides to the whole mess. While Douglas was holding me hostage, I’d met a girl—I mean, screw dating websites and house parties; apparently all the really eligible ladies are being held in cages these days. I would have liked to see Br...
She'd first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win's, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and the sound made by trapezoidal sections of melting sno...
Cabeza de Vaca had wrapped her in his arms and in his language, whispering about a life she did not understand although understanding seemed to form just beyond the sea and sand, waiting there for her to grow older. Even when the story confused her, ...
My friend Madea has "attitude" that comes with wisdom. Back in our teens and twenties, we thought we knew everything and made all those foolish mistakes. Then, when we got a little older, at thirty, we started getting these flashes of light, revelati...
I went outside. Tried taking in the billions of stars above, lingering long enough to allow each point of light the chance to scratch a deep hole in the back of my retina, so that when I finally did turn to face the dark surrounding forest I thought ...
Again, it's about patterns––you see the pattern, for example, that a young person has moral outrage and is finding effective ways to express it. It's very important that the older generation sees this, feels it, and tastes it. Otherwise they beco...
We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass. And then I open the door and go to ...
Barbed-Wire Salesman: I've never seen a man so broken up over a woman. What did he say her name was, Cara, Sara? Older Man on Train 2: Clara. Barbed-Wire Salesman: Clara! Clara Clayton: [Clara's eyes light up and she spins around in her seat] Excuse ...
