In the hovering between sleep and wakefulness, lucid but dreaming, Luce's mind got away from her, and all kinds of empty shit she had meant to put entirely behind her forever swam up and lived in her...
I don't even know whether past feelings and memories deserve any respect at all. Maybe they're no more important than a pinch of pain from an injury decades old. Feelings and memories rise and pass ev...
Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.
Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don't just survive. Celebrate.
Civilization balances always on a keen and precarious point, a showman spinning a fine Spode dinner plate on a long dowel slender as a stem of hay. A puff of breath, a moment’s lost attention, and it’...
A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either t...
The you you are with others is not you. To be lonesome is to be who you most fully are.
You can mire yourself in the past, but you can’t change a damn thing in that lost world.
When Luce did look in the mirror, she thought she might still be sort of pretty, if you went by what most people thought was pretty. And if that's the way you went, you had your own problems. It wasn'...
What I'm certain I don't want is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.
What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the w...
We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical
Thinking: this journey will be the axle of my life.
They did not talk much while they ate, other than for Ada to say that the Georgia boy did not seem like much of a one as far as men went. Ruby said she found him not particularly worse than the genera...
The cabins they passed among seemed solemn in their abandonment, cramped by the watercourse and the overhanging brow of the cloudy mountain. Some of its people might yet be living, and Ada wondered ho...
Some far day when she had become a better person and could feel something besides stinging anger that her beautiful, gentle sister had not protected herself more carefully against a world of threat.
So even very young she saw slavery as an ancient practice arising because rich people would rather not do hard work, and also from the tendency of people to clench hard to advantageous passages in the...
One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held more for him than just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and...
My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.
Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.