Do you feel that we can rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance, and our ability to forgive?
Why is it so painful to write about people who aren't assholes? I asked Wilson.Because I would start to love them, he said.
Irma, she said. But I had started to walk away. I heard her say some more things but by then I had yanked my skirt up and was running down the road away from her and begging the wind to obliterate her...
Go into hard things quickly, eagerly, then retreat.
Everytime I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment, not bleeding from my face. And those are powerful words of hope, really. - Nomi
During that time, The Mouth came by to pray with us, and my dad began to spend his evenings sitting in the yellow lawn chair and staring at the highway, or down in the basement with his isotope materi...
…just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.
Someday you’ll be gone, you’ll be dust, and then even less than dust. Nothing. There’s no other place to be. This world is good enough for you because it has to be. Go ahead and love it.
Wealthier Mennonites even though they're not technically supposed to be wealthy do their drinking in North Dakota or Hawaii. They are sort of like rock bands on tour in that the rules of this town don...
The sun is setting, Ona reminds us, and our light is fading. We should light the kerosene lamp.But what of your question? asks Greta. Should we consider asking the men to leave? None of us have ever a...
She says isn't it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named - when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes he...
Perhaps depression is caused by asking oneself too many unanswerable questions.
One night I heard my dad say to my mom: I can't help but think of the good times we're having now as being painful memories later on. And my mom saying, c'mon now honey.
Elf explained to me that she was exactly like this guy she'd read about in the paper, a guy who was blind from birth and then at the age of 40-something he had a corneal operation and could suddenly s...
Tina nods sagely and says yes and then something in Plautdietsch, probably something like heck yeah do we ever know what sad is. Sadness is what holds our bones in place.
They say nothing is my fault, and I wish they wouldn't say that. How can a man be forgiven if nothing is his fault?
Nothing happens in my life. Nothing has to happen, she said, for it to be life.
I could see my mother's beater Chevy way down below in the parking lot and I pushed the green button on her automatic starter to see how far away I could be from something to make it come to life. Not...
Suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia. My grandfather had big gree...
Where does violence go, if not directly back into our blood and bones?