Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.
It seemed to me that the baker had an honest response to the painting. Van Ruijven tried too hard when he looked at paintings, with his honeyed words and studied expressions. He was too aware of havin...
It is less distracting in the silence, she said. Sustained silence allows one truly to listen to what is deep inside. We call it waiting in expectation.
I stood by the fire, everyone around me so cheerful, and thought what an odd creature I am – even I know that. Too much space and I’m frightened, too little and I’m frightened. There is indeed no comf...
Prying out a stump reminded him of how deeply a tree clung to the ground, how tenacious a hold it had on a place. Though he was not a sentimental man - he did not cry when his children died, he simply...
Life itself was far messier and didn’t end so tidily with the heroine making the right match.
I have always admired most those who lead with their eyes, like Mary Anning, for they seem more aware of the world and its workings.
I have a bed and enough to eat and kind people about me. God is still with me. For these things I am grateful and have no reason to complain
I had always thought of the sea as a boundary keeping me in my place on land. Now, though, it became an opening.
At first I could not meet his eyes. When I did it was like sitting close to a fire that suddenly blazes up.
While Molly and Joseph Anning suffered materially that winter, with many days of weak soup and weaker fires, Mary barely noticed how little she was eating or the chilblains on her hands and feet. She...
We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.
We had not meant our choice to cut us off from our past, but it did. We had only the present and the future to think of in Lyme.
There followed a time when everything was dull. The things that had meant something lost importance, though they were still there, like bruises on the body that fade to hard lumps under the skin.
The second he was gone the women began chattering like chickens at the sight of a fox.
Stay here and do the packing and let the young one run all over California for you! Don't you always say the success of collecting is in the packing? You're the boss--take the most important role and...
My mommy told meIf I was goodyThat she would buy meA rubber dollyMy sister told herI kissed a soldierNow she won't buy meThat rubber dollyNow I am deadAnd in my grave
My father was often impatient during March, waiting for winter to end, the cold to ease, the sun to reappear. March was an unpredictable month, when it was never clear what might happen. Warm days rai...
I slowed my pace. Years of hauling water, wringing out clothes, scrubbing floors, emptying chamber pots, with no chance of beauty or color or light in my life, stretched before me like a landscape of...
I liked sleeping in the attic. There was no Crucifixion scene hanging at the foot of the bed to trouble me. There were no paintings at all, but the clean scent of linseed oil and the musk of the earth...