Even as we sat, prying lids off milk bottles, we could hear the persecuted cooks banging around back in the kitchen, grandmas barking at each other, preparing the daily grotesque.
Fair is whatever God wants to do.
He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry. He delivered all news as though it were good. Most welcome was his prediction that language would gradually return.
I made a fist and held it out. It didn't look like much—not like a fist anyone would count on for protection. If war came seeking a person I loved, that undernourished fist was not going to be enough....
I was drawn on. Conscious now that something needed doing, I moved ever higher on the land. Here entering an orchard of immense and archaic beauty. I say orchard: The trees were dense in one place, sc...
In times of dread it’s good to have an old man along. An old man has seen worse.
Is there a single person on whom I can press belief?No sir.All I can do is say, Here's how it went. Here's what I saw.I've been there and am going back.
It is one thing to be sick of your own infirmities and another to understand that the people you love most are sick of them also. You are very near then to being friendless in the world.
It’s never been hard for me to fall in love, a quality that has yet to simplify one single day of my life.
My sister, Swede, who often sees to the nub, offered this: People fear miracles because they fear being changed—though ignoring them will change you also.
Not anymore—not exactly. If I’d had more words, I’d have described Greenstone’s last operational motel, the Voyageur, a peeling L-shaped heap with scraggy whirlwinds of litter roaming the parking lot....
Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out...
Say what you like about melodrama, it beats confusion. The truth is we ought have a chance to say a little something when it’s getting dark. We ought to have a closing scene.
Whenever I didn't know what to write next, I put a swift river in front of his horse and sent the two of them across!
Yes, yes sir—routine is worry’s sly assassin.
You never like it to happen, for something as hopeful and sudden as a January thaw to come to an end, but end it does, and then you want to have some quilts around.
It’s difficult to do productive work and fume simultaneously—the labor dissipates your righteous steam—so
Do you know who is up at four in the morning? Dairy farmers. Paperboys. Lunatics.
Fresh peach pie can lift a bullying reprobate into apologetic courtesy; I have watched it happen.
Good advice is a wise man’s friend, of course; but sometimes it just flies on past, and all you can do is wave.
Showing 81 to 100 of 121 results