I don’t even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the beginning but if you didn’t choose right, and she hadn’t, things got narrow r...
You men notice so little, Pemberton. Physical strength is your gender's sole advantage.
After hours of wearing stifling suits while seated on rigid pews and high-backed dining chairs, to enter water and splay our limbs was freeing. The midday sun fell full on the pool, so when we waded i...
An image came back to him with such vividness that it might have been framed before him in glass
You got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, things got narrow real quick.
Dead and still in the world was worse than dead and in the ground. Dead in the ground at least gave you the hope of heaven.
Don't love anything that can be taken away.
He carries what he feels for people deep inside. Even as a kid he was that way, Aunt Margaret said. Your momma knows that. But I had wondered then as I did now what good love was that couldn’t be expr...
He suspected the workers thought of Serena as beyond gender, the same as they might some phenomenon of nature such as rain or lightning.
Then one morning she’d begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn’t remember wh...
He’d watched the old man live his life by the signs. Whether a moon waxed or waned decided when the crops were planted and harvested, the hogs slaughtered and the timber cut, even when a hole was best...
It’s ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing. – Snipes (185)
I listened to time clicking like hooves on pavement. But time isn't something you can rein in. It moves on without pause, taking us with it no matter how much we wish it otherwise.
I turn onto North Market Street to pass Thomas Wolfe’s house. I’d planned to do my dissertation on Wolfe. My advisor argued against it. Wolfe is all but forgotten now, she said, which seemed all the m...
What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she’d worn to ch...
It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember,...
A brown trout sips one off the surface. Beneath the trout, mica-flecked sand gleams white. Come fall the female's caudal fin will nudge the grains to make a nest, the eggs spilling like pearls into a...
A mown hay field appears, its blond stubble blackened by a flock of starlings. As I pass, the field seems to lift, peek to see what's under itself, then resettles. A pickup passes from the other direc...
It was the kind of early fall day Rachel had always loved, not warm or cold, the sky all deep-blue and cloudless and no breeze, the crops proud and ripe and the leaves so pretty but hardly a one yet f...
What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less...
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