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 leaned agains the warm brick wall and gazed up. It was a bright, cloudless day, the sky a mocking blue. It was the kind of day when children ran up and down the streets and shouted, when couples wal...
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.
I didn't move. I've learned from years of experience that dogs and falcons and ladies come back to you if you stay where you are.
At first I could not meet his eyes. When I did it was like sitting close to a fire that suddenly blazes up.
Yalnızca hırsızlar ve çocuklar koşar.
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.
Twenty-first-century attitudes towards time and our expectations of story are very different from the shape of Mary Anning’s life. She spent day after day, year after year, doing the same thing on the...
This was the sort of situation that she read about in the novels she favored, by authors such as Miss Jane Austen, whom Margaret was sure she’d met long ago at the Assembly Rooms the first time we vis...
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.
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...
People had gone west leaving behind all sorts of trouble; what they found in California was the space and freedom to create new trouble.
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...
Lick your lips, Griet.I licked my lips.Leave your mouth open.I was so surprised by this request that my mouth remained open of its own will. I blinked back tears. Virtuous women did not open their mou...
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.
If redwoods are the backbone of California, oaks are of England.
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...
I heard voices outside our front door - a woman's, bright as polished brass, and a man's, low and dark like the wood of the table I was working on. They were the kind of voices we heard rarely in our...