The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
The room looks as if a giant dog after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere.
The purpose of art is to elevate the spirit or to pay a surgeon’s bill. Or both. It can help a person remember or forget.
The policy of our nation is made in cities, controlled largely by urban voters who aren’t well informed about the changes on the face of our land, and the men and women who work it.
The obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete.
The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows
The flatness was stultifying. She wouldn’t say this aloud because in light of other worries it seemed self-indulgent, but Willa missed mountains. Missed them hard, with the psychic equivalent of a too...
The dancers were butterflies. From a hundred paces Salomé could see the dirt under these girls’ fingernails, but not their wings.
That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that’s how they do it here. Maybe he’s been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of...
Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Adah inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
So Noah cursed all Ham's children to be slaves forever and ever. That's how come them to turn out dark
Shoes, then, sliding me across the floor to greet the day. Dreaming of coffee. I’m afraid I didn’t miss the physical presence of my husband in his absences as much as I missed coffee.
She would die of him or be cured.
She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.
Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
Our way was to share a fire until it burned down, To speak to each other until every person was satisfied. Younger men listened to older men. Now the tell us the vote of a young, careless man counts...
One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of them hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight. Wow, we all said—what a good idea! Garrison Keillor says...
Now I need to be careful where I go next, because (for their own protection) there are laws in thirteen states that make it illegal to say anything bad about cows.
Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of to...
Many bright people are really in the dark about vegetable life. Biology teachers face kids in classrooms who may not even believe in the metamorphosis of bud to flower to fruit and seed, but rather, s...