I do not deny that you overwhelm me with your beauty. You are the moon in the season of shadow light; you are the fruit of the candlewood tree; you are the phoenix in circles of flight --.
Humans are so blind, their eyes on the ground, themselves always at the center. Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only...
He spoke in one of the American accents; Lydia couldn’t distinguish among them. To her they all sounded dry and tinny. Almost quack-like.
For one short wet month early in the next year the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water frothing at the hedges bubbling at the roadside splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of...
Evil is moral at it heart. The selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend not to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience.
Every choice brings wisdom in its wake. If you got to have the wisdom first, it wouldn't be a choice--just policy
Death might be the only way forward for someone. Or it might seem so at the time
Day after day in the season of disaster, it can be hard to recognize a chance in fortune when it comes.
Children talk themselves out of their convictions as they grow up and become distracted by their huge selfish selves. All the literature is consistent on this point. Children begin to think they've im...
But to be most effective, the faces of the children would need to be painted in a blur, the way all children’s faces truly are. For they blur as they run; they blur as they grow and change so fast; an...
But though her thoughts were rich and complicated, her words were poor, and she merely grunted.
But the pinkness and whiteness of underskirts and camisoles, the frilliness of foundation garments, the rustle about the bustle and the fuss about the bust.
But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that...
Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes our lives less miserable so that we might be more kind—well, then, let’s have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our st...
At her feet was a largish basket woven of twigs. He didn't look into it; he couldn't. Every now and then her shoeless foot would nip out from beneath the dark hem of her skirt and give the basket a li...
As years pass, and the abundance of the future is depleted, the crux of old mistakes and the cost of old choices are ever recalibrated. Resentment, the interest in umbrage derived from being wronged,...
As Solomon said in the Old Book, if two women squabble over which of them is the mother of a certain infant, the way to solve the problem is to cut the baby in half and share the baby in parts.
And that aroma of sex … soft baby asparagus cut with a weak solution of Clorox.
And in the cave there lived a wicked old witch. Did she ever come out? Not yet.
All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn’t we hear a voic...