“Not just anyone can make pasteles, a traditional island specialty served at holiday feasts (and no one of Puerto Rican ancestry, it seems, can long live without consuming them). But who, any more, knows how to…

“Let’s just put it this way: energy doesn’t just, poof, disappear. Love doesn’t just, zap, evaporate. Beings as vital and individual and integral and real as I am, as you are, F.T., persevere.…

“Now, Iyengar-Style Yoga, which is the genre I study, practice and teach, is something like ballet `a la Balanchine. And Balanchine is a name The Fairies know and respect. But he would have…

“When it comes to religion, a great many of us are like three-year-olds clutching teddy bears, and one does NOT march up to a toddler, snatch away his transitional object, and then dismember…

“I would not miss: most of human history (The Inquisition, The War in Vietnam, The Endless War in Afpakiraq, the Israelis vs. The Palestinians, The Northern Irish vs. The Southern Irish, The Bosnians…

“It was one of her astonishing gifts—and many people are now attesting to this gift in the wake of her death this past spring—to notice when a fellow sentient being had caught her…

“Now, I have a problem with New Jersey. I loathe it in its entirety. Countless times in my long life, I have said aloud that there are two places I would never live:…

“For a young woman writer who had lost patience with the clever, artificial and antiseptic prose of Updike, Mailer and the other anti-feminist, essentially anti-life “big boys” of American prose writing, Nin was…

“In the years since I’d last been there, The Esso Club had morphed into a . . . mega-sports-bar, punctuated by huge flat-screens, intelligently amusing items of bar-décor, and literate, drop-dead-gorgeous wait staff…

“For the most part, the South Carolina I’ve known since my birth in 1951, is fast-morphing, with the recovery of the country’s economy at large, into a country of other men entirely: Spanish-speaking…