The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.
The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don't know.
The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and chaotic. It's the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrat...
The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call soil is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the s...
She understands all at once, with a small shock, exactly what it is she always needed to tell Harland: being there in person is not the same as watching. You might see things better on television, but...
She made it plain that her fondest wish was to have a grandbaby. Whenever fat Irene would pick up the baby, which was not too often, Mrs. Hoge would declare, Irene, you don't know how becoming that lo...
Sept 15 1930 at the independence festival of the school of cretins…At the head of the table by the bowl of pomegranates, Senora Bartolome had put a note: Take only one, our Lord Jesus is watching!.A s...
Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes, he still loves to say, as often as possible. It’s hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in...
Remember how we use to pray to get invited to birthday parties? And they only asked us because we were so grateful we'd do anything, stay late and help the mothers wash the cake pans. I'm still that g...
Really it’s just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club. How long can that la...
Passing through every wall are electronic beams that create a shadow play of desire staged by the puppeteers of globalized commerce, who fund their advertising each year with more than a hundred dolla...
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs...
Oh, Rachel, Rachel, Leah said. Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. So...
No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins.
Nathan was something that happened to us, as devastating in its way as the burning roof that fell on the family Mwanza; with our fate scarred by hell and brimstone we still had to track our course. An...
My favored mulching method is to cover the ground between rows of plants with a year’s worth of our saved newspapers; the paper and soy-based ink will decompose by autumn. Then we cover all that newsp...
Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.
Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.
Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony. Well, I put up with him anyway.