Why should it feel so risky to count concretely on a future?
When you’re given a brilliant child, you polish her and let her shine.
When the rain pours down especially, we have long hours of captivity, in which my sisters determinedly grow bored. But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to d...
When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up.
When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order. If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever...
When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.
What do you think people want, if it's not greatness and to be remembered for all time?Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss.
What a revelation, that I could carry my own parcel like any woman here!
What a knot of history one mistake can become.
What I’m saying is nobody feels sorry for anybody anymore, nobody even pretends they do. Not even the President. It’s like it’s become unpatriotic.
To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story...
To live is to be marked, to live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.
To have been made the creatures we are is a marvel. If the process required millennia rather than seven days, how can it be any less sublime?
Thousands of ordinary people were part of this metropolis, but their homes would have been perishable wattle and thatch, stuccoed with lime and mud. Every trace of their living has returned to the ear...
This is why we do it all over again every year. Fueled only by the stuff they drink from the air and earth, the bush beans fill out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sk...
This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite ci...
This book tells the story of what we learned, or didn’t; what we ate, or couldn’t; and how our family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the same place where we worked, lo...
They wait out the dry months kind of dead-like, just like everything else, and when the rain comes they wake up and crawl out of the ground and start to holler.
There can be no greater spiritual accomplishment than to come through brutal trials and then look back and see that mean times did not render us mean spirits.
The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are pref...