Sometimes I've survived anger only one minute at a time, by saying to myself again and again that the best kind of revenge is some kind of life beyond this, some kind of goodness. And I can lay no cla...
Mary and Thatcher had lived in enviable times, when biologists were discovering new species right and left, not watching them go extinct.
It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life... Maybe bein...
If chained is where you have been, your ams will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or...
Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.
People ask without wanting to know.
What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't be...
To stomp about the world ignoring cultural differences is arrogant, to be sure, but perhaps there is another kind of arrogance in the presumption that we may ever really build a faultless bridge from...
On the hill behind her crows flew one by one into the bare trees, arranging their dark blots in the scrim of branches and adding their warnings to the drear sounds of this day. Gone, gone, they rasped...
But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.
The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.
What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appre...
To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
Love changes everything. I never suspected it would be so. Requited love, I should say ...
If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business.
He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down...
For scientists, reality is not optional.