You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.
You from out of town? he asked after a while, eying my car. No, I said. I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate. I didn’t like his looks.
You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.
You can't let your heart go bad like that, like sour milk. There's always a chance you'll want to use it later.
Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?' he asked me suddenly. 'When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?'I shook my head. 'No,...
When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.
Tig was a unique element with all valences open.
This particular brand of tyrant, though. Yikes, Willa said. I can’t take him seriously. He’s going to burn out before the first primary. Don’t count on it. There’s a lot of white folks out there hangi...
This marriage has failed to warm her.
Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Matthew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonsense to us now. All that foot washing, for example. Was it really for God's glory or...
They saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom
There's people I love. But there's so many other kinds of love, too. And people act so hateful to every kind but their own.
There is something else I must confess about Tata Boanda: he's a sinner. Right in the plain sight of God he has two wives, a young and an old one. Why, they all come to church! Father says we're to pr...
Soli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.
So you make a deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.'…'No, it's not like that. It's not making a dea...
She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.
Right there in the middle of the road he took the cigarette out of my mouth and put it in his, then struck a match on his thumbnail and lit the two of them together, exactly like Humphrey Bogart. Then...
People automatically estimate a mom's IQ at around her children's ages, maybe dividing by the number of kids, rounding up to the nearest pajama size.
Pay attention to your dreams; when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.
On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing; all animals kill to survive, and we are animals. The lion kills the baboon, the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The...