I'll lead you to the river of knowledge. You can catch your own damn fish.
I'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn't just stop at eye level.
I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.
I went a day. Spent that evening standing at the window lighting one cigarette off the last, after she’d gone, to keep myself from sitting and writing out the scene as freshly recalled. One week, thir...
I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as...
I was occupied so entirely by each day, I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year. History didn't cross my mind. Now it does. Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apar...
I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them
I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.
I suppose it is in our nature, she said finally. When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.
I see books as windows out of a little life into the great world.Writing fiction is a dance. It's controlled lunacy. Hearing voices in your head — they give people drugs for that.
I realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.
I may be a preacher’s daughter, but I know a thing or two. And one of them is, when men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that’s going to change the whole wi...
I know how people are with their habits of mind... as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people. Most have no earthly notion...
I keep hoping some guy with 'Ron' or 'Andy' stitched on his pocket and a gas pump in his hand will step up and tell me where I'm headed.
I hold on to my adopted shore, chanting private vows: wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need. Let me be a good animal today. Let me dance in the waves of my private tide, the...
I don't know, Magda says, Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon.
I don't know how you go on, but I really hope you'll keep doing it. That you won't give up esperanza. I thought of that last night. Esperanza is all you get, no second chances. What you have to do is...
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understan...
I am telling you what I’m telling you. Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if...