And then he saw what he was, an old man, ready to die, pressed against the Greenland earth, as small as an ash berry on the face of a mountain, and he did the only thing that men can do when they know...
Arthur said, You must know that you don't love children for being good or bad. I know you know that.Why do you love them?Because you do, said Arthur. Because they don't know what's coming and maybe yo...
Dean Harstad had unbounded patience, the very patience that drove Chairman X bananas, patience as a weapon.
Don’t you want to know what happened? Carol turned to look at her and put her hands on her hips. She said, No, I don’t, because I don’t want you making a story out of it, because as soon as you make a...
Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.
Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I...
Cats swore that they had pretended to be domesticated to protect themselves—any cat who lived with a human did so under duress, and all cats escaped whenever they could.
Her parents took her very seriously; she had trained them, with a combination of treats and punishments, to allow her to do as she pleased and express herself, and to pay attention to her opinions. Th...
I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have reached the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don't think it is the years themselves, or the disi...
You don't make 'em trot for one thing and run for the other.
If you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can’t get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the sense...
It is hard to know whether an air of self-confidence precedes or follows success.
I’ve experienced having you in the house. It’s like living with a loud motor running all the time. Up, down, into this room and that room, eating supper, jumping from the table, cursing all the time,...
Once again, the curious thing was how strange and forceful the world was, how it battered and clanged and could not be withstood, and yet some individuals withstood it while others did not.
She was almost sixty and she had not been to London, or Paris, or Rome, and there was no going there now. Yes, she was balanced, as she had gotten into the habit of congratulating herself for being. B...
There were so many things Rosanna could have been besides a farm wife, she thought. But it was not a source of regret—it was a source of pride.
We knew right off how to think of them but not precisely how to feel about them.
I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
But from this distance, the velvety reds, flashing yellows and glassy whites [of the roses] seemed to break up the light of the summer sun into its various elements and cast it back far more brilliant...
I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
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