His confidence was enviable and maddening. Most of the time she didn’t want him to solve or contradict her worries, she just needed him to listen and agree with her on the awfulness at hand. This was...
Her every possession was either unbreakable, or broken.
Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot.
A quick way to improve food-related fuel economy would be to buy a quart of motor oil and drink it.
A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid...
When someone mattered like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.
What is new is that we know so very much about the world, or at least the part of it that is most picturesquely exploding on any given day, that we're left with a desperate sense that all of it is exp...
Waar het om gaat is dat als je het hebt over identiteit, je dat niet zomaar uit mensen kunt wegredeneren. Het verdwijnt niet door de minachting van buitenstaanders, het wordt er juist door verhevigd.
WOMEN ON THEIR OWN RUN in Alice’s family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dar...
This is how we celebrate the Day of the Dead in America: by turning up our collars against the scent of earthworms calling us home.
The tunnel of winter had settled over our lives, ushered in by that great official Hoodwink, the end of daylight saving time. Personally I would vote for one more hour of light on winter evenings inst...
Thatcher wondered what task could be more wearisome than shoring up a stupid man’s confidence in his own wisdom.
That night marks my life's dark center, the moment when growing up ended and the long downward slope toward death began. The wonder to me now is that I thought myself worth saving...I reached out and...
Oh, it's a fine and useless enterprise, trying to fix destiny. That trail leads straight back to the time before we ever lived, and into that deep well it's easy to cast curses like stones on our ance...
Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most human scenario for farmers is...
Many other raw food products--notably poultry from CAFOs--typically carry a much higher threat to human health in terms of pathogen load, and yet the government trusts us to render it safe in our own...
Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.
It is in his absence I prosper.
I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
Every family's its own trip to China.