What a revelation, that I could carry my own parcel like any woman here!
We’re genetically predisposed toward certain behaviors that we’ve collectively decided are unhelpful; adultery and racism are possible examples. With reasonable success, we mitigate those impulses thr...
Well, my stars, the thing was like the Bible—look hard enough in its pages, and you’ll find what you seek. Love your neighbor, or slay him with the jawbone of an ass.
Well, but it’s criminal negligence, really. These kids have to grow up and run things. Larger things than a ball field, I mean. What kind of world will they really be able to make?
We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want to.
We may not like thinking about it, but germs crawl eternally over every speck of our planet. Our own bodies are bacterial condos, with established relationships between the upstairs and downstairs nei...
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...
Unsheltered, I live in daylight. And like the wandering bird I rest in thee.
To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story...
This book tells the story of what we learned, or didn’t; what we ate, or couldn’t; and how our family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the same place where we worked, lo...
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 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.
There can be no greater spiritual accomplishment than to come through brutal trials and then look back and see that mean times did not render us mean spirits.
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 substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.
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 loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.
The devil here is a boy with too much imagination, he usually said.
The best artifact was the calendar of the ancients, a great carved piece of stone as big as a kitchen, circular, bolted to the wall like a giant clock. In the center was an angry face looking out, as...