Sounding surprised. That’d make a nice hostess gift.
Might call it a great passion. When the true name of what we’re dealing with is greed, or lust. We all have the special talent of believing in a falsehood, and believing it devoutly, when we want it t...
It. But when a man’s words are taken from him and poisoned, it’s the same as poisoning the man. He could not speak, for how his own tongue would be fouled. Words were his all. I felt I’d witnessed a m...
Colonial American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to continent) squawked outside, utterly ignored. The dominant cu...
[on her Amish friends]I do know this family has borne losses and grief, just like the rest of us. But if they are generally content, must such a life inevitably be dismissed as mythical, or else merel...
[from an entry by her daughter Camille] If nobody is spritzing chemicals on the predators, all a plant can do is toughen up by manufacturing its own disease/pest-fighting compounds. That's why organic...
[from an entry by her daughter Camille] American culture doesn't allow much room for slow reflection. I watch the working people who are supposed to be my role models getting pushed to go, go, go and...
[from an entry by her daughter Camille] ...research published fifteen years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine: eggs from chickens that ranged freely on grass have about half the cholesterol o...
[Sylvain] told us that in India it's sometimes considered a purification ritual to go home and spend a year eating everything from one place--ideally, even to grow it yourself. I liked this name for w...
Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occa...
Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.
You're thinking of revolution as a great all-or-nothing. I think of it as one more morning in a muggy cotton field, checking the undersides of leaves to see what's been there, figuring out what to do...
You're asking yourself, Can I give this child the best possible upbringing and keep her out of harm's way her whole life long? The answer is no, you can't. But nobody else can either. Not a state home...
You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my perm...
You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Beca...
You can resign from the Woman's Club, but the world is all, you can't just stop attending.
You can fool history sometimes, but you can’t fool the memory of your intimates.
Yet I stake a claim, I am here, for I must be somewhere. But only as a child it seems, struggling to understand what every wife and gentleman passing on the street seems to know by rote. Whom to love,...
With that one little booklet put back in place, it came as a different story. Because of that burrow through rock and water—lacuna, he called it. This time I read with a different heart, understanding...
Willa believed in the power of worry to keep another human from flying out of orbit.