Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another.
April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, al...
Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It's peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
And you came over to make sure I was all right, is that what you're telling me? You came over here with your shotgun to protect me from my scarecrow?I had to, Garnett said, spreading his hands, throwi...
Anatole has been explaining to me the native system of government. He says the business of throwing pebbles into bowls with the most pebbles winning an election—that was Belgium’s idea of fair play, b...
An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, s...
All knowledge measured, first and last, by one’s allegiance to the teacher.
Alice hands Annawake a handkerchief. Young people never carry them, she's noticed. They haven't yet learned that heartbreak can catch up to you on any given day.
After a while Estevan said, What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere.
According to Indian crop ecologist Vandana Shiva, humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eig...
AS LONG AS I KEPT MOVING, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it c...
A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't, this world would end at once.
A person can succeed and fail at the same time. Maybe letting me down was your way of getting me to be me.
A million dead butterflies, she said. Sorry as hell they ever landed here.
A lifetime of people, unconfirmed by their living presences, or photographs or descriptions in a notebook, can only skulk in the corners like ghosts. They shift like chimeras. Careful words of warning...
A life was a life. She'd been orphaned at an age to internalize death as poor material for a joke. And likewise, salvation.
A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into compl...
A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.
A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.
A blank space on a form, the missing page, a void, a hole in your knowledge of someone--it's still some real . It exists. You don't get to fill it in with whatever you want.