In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into hi...
It feels strange to me to be living in a box, hiding from the steadying influence of the moon; wearing the hide of a cow, which is supposed to be dyed to match God-knows-what, on my feet; making promi...
It made no sense, a lifespan of a few weeks did not add up to an annual migration of many thousand miles. How did they learn where to go?
It was a true conversation. About whether our ancestors had more important lives than we do. And how they've managed to trick us, if they did not.
It was strange to speak forthrightly, after living at Mrs. Bittle’s those years: exiting the bathroom with downcast eyes, sitting at supper while old Mr. Judd piped up with his yellowed news extras. N...
It wasn’t all a waste, she told him over and over, holding on. Some things they got right, she was sure of that. The children. And for all the rest they wept, a merged keening that felt bottomless. Fo...
It's terrible to lose somebody, I said, I mean, I don't know firsthand, but I can imagine it must be. But it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so mu...
It’s a fact of our culture that the loudest mouths get the most airplay, and the loudmouths are saying that in times of crisis it’s treasonous to question our leaders.
I’m always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.
I’m saying when God slams a door on you it’s probably a shitstorm. You’re going to end up in rubble. But it’s okay because without all that crap overhead, you’re standing in the daylight.
I’ve seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The free-range vegetarian hens testimony on an egg-carton l...
Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, confidence swaggering into the storm: Man against Nature. Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this...
Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.
Mi'ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.
Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one.
Modern US consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize...
Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors--however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trouble.
Most people lived so far from it, they thought you could just choose, carnivore or vegetarian, without knowing that the chemicals on grain and cotton killed far more butterflies and bees and bluebirds...
Most people of my grandparents' generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics ... This knowledge has vanished from our culture. We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn't too import...
Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks.
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