Some lucky people remember only the good times and refuse to dwell on their tragedies. My family is not among that group. Wherever two or more of my ancient ancestors gather together, the air becomes fetid with tales of the suffering experienced by the long-expired....

My college writing instructor -- a magnificent old Welshman who claimed to have known W.C. Fields and to have survived a fistfight with Robert Shaw -- advised against writing outdoors. It seems like a good idea, he said. But then the bugs bite and the sun is in your...

Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl. ― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory It is just an illusion here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever... All...

To remain master of one's four virtues: courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude. For solitude is a virtue with us, as a sublime bent and bias to purity, which divines that in the contact of man and man, in society, it must be unavoidably impure. All society makes one...