Every education brings a point of reckoning, and this was his: seeing the world divided in two camps, the investigators and the sweeteners
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. Betrayal is a friend I have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back wi...
But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will di...
Because nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness.
And my husband, why, hell hath no fury like a Baptist preacher.
Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I never get over being thankful for that - for the courage of my readers.
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
The unbearable persistence of hope
She believed material desires were toxic.
Writing, which was both painful and palliative for me, turned out to be my own way of giving blood in a crisis. I can only hope this unit of words will have a longer shelf life than the forty-two days...
There are Christians, and there are Christians.
My firstborn and my baby both tried to shed me like a husk from the start, and the twins came with a fine interior sight with which they could simply look past me at everything more interesting.
It’s a funny thing to complain about, but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time back I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived I...
In summer a young rooster’s fancy turns to…how can I say this delicately? The most ham-fisted attempts at courtship I’ve ever had to watch. (And yes, I’m including high school.)
Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet
I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with cl...
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...
God hates us, I said.Don't blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from Congolese ants.They have to swarm over a village and eat other people alive...
But Pascal quickly forgave me, and it's a good thing, since friends of my own age and gender were not available, the girls of Kilanga all being too busy hauling around firewood, water, or babies. It d...
Beene-beene. The truest truth.