There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.
Realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.
You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.
You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don't expect them to do a thing for you. They're far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven's name we will do next.
When men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that's going to change the whole wide world.
What a knot of history one mistake can become.
We try to reason with one another, but only manage to tear ourselves apart.
To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assu...
There he’d found the pasteboard notebook: the most beautiful book ever, it could become anything.
There but for the grace of serotonin go the rest of us.
The women of his family would become one with the earth’s creatures only by pressing the bones of whales against their rib cages until breathless.
The traffic was moving about the speed of a government
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 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 obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete.
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 flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows
The dancers were butterflies. From a hundred paces Salomé could see the dirt under these girls’ fingernails, but not their wings.
The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.
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...