There he’d found the pasteboard notebook: the most beautiful book ever, it could become anything.
The rule of fishes is the same as the rule of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten. They share a single jumpy heart that drives them to move all together, runnin...
The girl was compulsively honest. In earlier years, Willa’s every attempt to teach her the artful evasion known as tact would get shot down with Mom, that’s lying! And Tig remained the child who annou...
The better part of friendship might be holding one’s tongue over the prospect of self-made wreckage.
Tata Jesus is bangala!
Take your place, then. Look at what happened from every side and consider all the other ways it could have gone. Consider, even, an Africa unconquered altogether. Imagine those first Portuguese advent...
Symptomatic of this rural-urban identity crisis is our eager embrace of a recently imposed divide: the Red States and the Blue States. That color map comes to us with the suggestion that both coasts a...
She would just be catching up when I'd go again, swimming farther out into life because I still hadn't found a rock to stand on.
Plus, Tig said, it reminds me to be patient. Seeing all these people that have passed on. I get frustrated sometimes, waiting. For people to die? Yeah. To be honest. The guys in charge of everything r...
Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.
Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.
Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Genera...
Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
One red feather for celebration. No one yet has seen it but me. When Miss Dickinson says, Hope is the thing with feathers, I always think of something round—a ball from one of the games I will never p...
Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
Jazon and Mical. What kind of mother misspelled her kids’ names on purpose?
In my opinion, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you loook down on them from a great height.
I'm a scientist who thinks it wise to enter the doors of creation not with a lion tamer's whip and chair, but with the reverence humankind has traditionally summoned for entering places of worship: a...
I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.