If you grow corn or trade in pigs or write poetry then you go to Iowa City. That’s why I haven’t been.
If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow....
IT TAKES A certain amount of effort to be miserable and another kind of effort to be happy, and I was willing to do the work of happiness. I figured even if I couldn’t make Lucy deeply happy, I could...
I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.
I remember complaining one night on the phone to my mother that we spent too much of our time worrying about love and money. Think of it as research, she said. That’s what everybody writes about.
I received a gift--it was the first decent piece of instruction about marriage I had ever been given in my 25 years of live. Does your husband make you a better person?
I learned the most from sticking with my dream even when all signs told me it was time to let go.
I have always believed that the desire for revenge is one of life’s great motivators, and my success would be my revenge
His understanding that he would eventually lose every sweetness that had come to him only made him hold those very things closer to his chest.
He wondered now if everyone had a private life. He wondered if his wife had one. It was possible that all those years he had been alone, never knowing that a complete world existed and no one spoke of...
He realized now he was only just beginning to see the full extent to which it was his destiny to follow, to walk blindly into fates he could never understand. In fate there was reward, in turning over...
He had lived his life as a good father but now Oscar Mendoza saw again his life as a boy. A daughter was a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and always lost. He kne...
He doesn’t know to want for more because nothing in his life has been as much as this...on that night he thinks that no one has ever had so much and only later will he know he should have asked for mo...
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.
Duty—honor—country,’ he said in the voice of an old white man who’d been battered by war. ‘Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.
Did you ever want to be a writer? No, she said, and she would have told him. I only wanted to be a reader.
Clearly, we are not all ruined, and if we are, at some point it becomes our own responsibility.
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
At least she was not a tall woman. She was a pixie, a pocket Venus.
As long as it's a regular day, not too rough to begin with, the ocean is pretty smooth once you make it out past the first set of waves. That's why people are afriad to swim in the ocean. They try to...