We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want
War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.
Until that morning when we all went to the riverbank, I still believed Mother would take Leah, not me. Leah who, even in her malarial stupor, rushed forward to crouch with the battery in the canoe and...
They couldn't close out the whole world, maybe, but they could sure find something on their TV or radio to put scientists or foreigners or whatever they thought he was in a bad light. Truly, they were...
There’s nothing like living as a refugee in one’s own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist.
There's a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true but you haven't told anyone yet. Of all things, that is what I remember most. It was so quiet.
There was room in Adah for nought but pure love and pure hate. Such a life is satisfying and deeply uncomplicated.
The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is almost so simple I can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to...
The notebook from the tobacco stand was the beginning of hope: a prisoner’s plan for escape. Its empty pages would be the book of everything, miraculous and unending like the sea at night, a heartbeat...
The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a bit of restraint -- virtues that are hardly the prop...
The color brown, I realized, is anything but nondescript. It comes in as many hues as there are colors of earth, with is commonly presumed infinite.
The clock gulps softly, eating second whole while she waits...
The Middle East and North Africa are almost out of water. Asia’s underwater. Syria is dystopian, Somalia, Bangladesh, dystopian. Everybody’s getting weather that never happened before. Melting permafr...
Take one trip overland here and you'll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream.
Sometimes, in his nightmares, everything on this desk sings at once. He comes back
Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.
People had to manage terrible truths.
Or the quaking misgivings that infected every step forward, after a loss.
Oh, and the camel. Was it a camel that could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man? Or a coarse piece of yarn? The Hebrew words are the same, but which one did they mean? If it’...
My Kentucky NCAA Champions shirt was by now so bloodstained, you would think I had worn it to a North Carolina game. Also, I had feathers sticking to my hair.