In Congo, a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matt...
If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known.
I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.
I'm too fascinated to hide indoors or stay cooped up in our yard. Curiosity killed the cat, I know, but I try to land on my feet.
I was exhausted but also for the first time in weeks I felt sleepiness, that rare, delicious liqueur, soaking into my body like blotter paper.
I tried to recall where I had been at sunup that day. It was in St. Louis, Missouri, where they have that giant McDonald’s thing towering over the city,
I thought I’d had a pretty hard life. But I keep finding out that life can be hard in ways I never knew about.
I think of my canning as fast food, paid for in time up front.
I suppose it is in our nature, she said finally. When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order. If that is our nature, then nature is madn...
I read what Hallie said about not wanting to save the world, that you didn’t choose your road for the reward at the end, but for the way it felt as you went along.
I read in a book that they cut off the workers’ hands if they hadn’t collected enough rubber by the end of the day. The Belgian foremen would bring baskets full of brown hands back to the boss, piled...
I love it for what it tells me about life. I love fiction, strangely enough, for how true it is, If it can tell me something I didn't already know, or maybe suspected but never framed quite that way,...
I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white...
I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.
I had a window seat, and in a Greyhound you're up high. You pass through the land like some rajah on an elephant looking down on your kingdom.
I don’t know where to start, Lou Ann, I told her. There’s just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they’re down—look what they do to those people a...
I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? T...
I became determined to know a few steps more of that path every day.
I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar,' she said, and then thought a bit. 'Sometimes we'll buy pretzels as a splurge.'It crossed my mind that the world's...
I am not sure how so many Americans came to believe only our wealthy are capable of honoring a food aesthetic.