He couldn’t help but like the look of children when they were sleeping. Is
Had they thought for a minute that things might turn out the way they did they never would have had the courage to begin.
Far outside the city the tree frogs were calling her, and the deep, rhythmic pulse of their voices set the blood flow to her heart.
Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?
But Dr. Rapp had no self-aggrandizing notions about his role in the tribe. He never set himself out to be the great white hero. He never took a single specimen more than what was absolutely needed. He...
Bert . . . had grown up with frozen concentrate mixed into pitchers of water which, although he hadn't known it at the time, had nothing to do with orange juice. Now his children drank fresh-squeezed...
Bad habits were all a matter of perspective, and as long as the present was viewed through the lens of the past, anyone would say he was doing a spectacular job. He
He had found her life meaningful when she could make no sense of it at all.
Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 1...
If I wanted to be a better writer, I was the only person who could push myself to do it. It was up to me to challenge myself, to be vigilant about finding the places in my own work where I was just ge...
Better to have done something, to have stood for something great and gotten shot for it than it was to never stand up for anything and die like everybody else.
You can learn more, and more quickly, from other people’s missteps than from their successes. If
When Lucy believed that there were actually things in the world that were worse than what had happened to her, she could pull herself up on this knowledge like a rope. When she lost sight of it, she s...
We both had our first kiss from the same boy in college (a sainted and tender soul who must have made it his business to kiss the girls who would have otherwise graduated unkissed).
We all have ideas, sometimes good ones, not to mention the gift of emotional turmoil that every childhood provides.
To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall .... [p.218 ff.]
There will always be people there to tell a pretty girl what she should be doing or thinking. At the counter, it’s the pretty girls you can always sell the most to. They never know their minds. You
There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equality that sustain us later on...These moments are the foundation upon which we build the house that will shel...
The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, You have no need for sight. Listen.
The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.