However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks.
Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she’d ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie...
And she had gone off from her husband to live by herself with the priests, had she not? Does a man, seeing a trinket lying before him in the grass, fail to pick it up?
I had a burden lift off me that I hadn't even felt the heaviness of until then, and it was the burden of having to wait and see what was going to happen.
How could she pursue the transcendence and virtue of the intellectual life when her mind had disappeared into her body like a sponge into a basin of ink? Which did not mean,
He’d said, Remember that Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’? The dairy farmer’s curse is, may you have an interesting herd of cows.
Do you think I would want to live under a government that you ran or set up? It’s all very nice to say you’re an anarchist, but you only want anarchy for yourself. For the rest of us, you want to make...
At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road.
After him came a cast of characters out of her worst nightmares—Linda Chavez, Arch Puddington, twenty others as bad, all of whom, she could imagine, had a secret password such as a derogatory remark a...
A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.
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...
And the thick, sugary covering of the snow...
What it feels like to resist without seeming to resist, to absent yourself while seeming respectful and attentive.
What Is Really Going On in Spain? was another. Who’s the Boss? was about whether members of the
Two, she thought, was the most ephemeral age, the age of incipient consciousness, when personality was first chinking into place. Felicity was her last chance to enjoy this, and so she did, day after...
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...
If you lived in the same place long enough, everything reminded you of everything else.
He was turning out to be one of those men whose interest diminished as they got to know you. You got into this pattern of trying to be interesting by revealing more and more of yourself, like a salesm...
He had accepted that if you were a bookish person the events in your life took place in your head.
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...