At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in th...
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...
And fairly enough she thought, for that was the way of the world. A road was to be driven upon. The candy dish was there to be eaten, money in the bank got spent, people claimed whatever they could ge...
And I have no idea how to be kind to myself. Living, as a general enterprise, seems unkind beyond belief.
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...
Already? How can this be? I would ask, shattered by the terrible truth that I needed a three-ring binder and some #2 pencils. It’s not that school was a bad thing. Summer was just so much better.
All that hurry can blur the truth that life is a zero-sum equation. Every minute I save will get used on something else, possibly no more sublime than staring at the newel post trying to remember what...
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.
A mother’s unfulfilled ambitions lie heaviest on her daughters.
A mother's body remembers her babies--the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has its own entreaties to body and soul. It's the last one, though, that overtakes y...
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 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 flower is a plant's way of making love.
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.
The houses all seemed a little senile, with arthritc hinges and window screens hanging at embarrassing angles.
The blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living.
Our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?
You always write about individualism vs. community, and that you see independence as stupidity and instead celebrate dependency.
The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners