The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.

Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

Family caregiving has become a predictable crisis. Americans are living longer and longer but dying slower and slower.

As a young surgeon in training at the University of California San Francisco General Hospital in the early '80s, my colleagues and I were inundated with an epidemic of young men with fevers, rashes, swollen lymph nodes and eventually death.

Even though we look at the past through the lens of distance and think that because people are wearing different clothes or have different technology, their experiences are different, it's all the same, right? Our experience of love and sex and death are the same in any time period.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.