As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language. - Joan Didion

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned.

We were that generation called silent, but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.