He warned Mother not to flout God’s Will by expecting too much of us. “Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,’ he still loves to say, as often as possible....

A novel works it’s magic by putting a reader inside another person’s life. The pace is as slow as life. It’s as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline...

A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.

If chained is where you have been, your ams will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You’ll look at the scars on your arms...

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

Now, see, that’s why everybody wants Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy.’ Dovey’s phone buzzed, and she laughed, ignoring it. ‘The trouble is,...

Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man’s skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people’s back yards.

Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.

Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don’t respect his work?

Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother.

I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.

On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all...

God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside...

She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.

This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together....

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won’t even stand close to the blade. I’m...

You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don’t expect them to do a thing for you. They’re far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven’s name we will do...

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.

Some of life’s greatest calls were answered not by the head but by the body.

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had – a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they’d sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn’t...

Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing.

Sometimes I’ve survived anger only one minute at a time, by saying to myself again and again that the best kind of revenge is some kind of life beyond this, some kind of goodness. And...

Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers.

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook....

I almost never respect men. They’re like flowers — all show, a lot of color and lust. You pick them and throw them on the ground.

Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It’s kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it’s no good to...

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

Sometimes history cleaves and for one helpless moment stands still like the pause when the ax splits a log and the two halves rest on end waiting to fall.

Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems...

Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,’ he said. ‘We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.

This will be Great Mam’s last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.

A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest’s conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.

…whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And peace will be with you.

It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant’s afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it’s been many years now since my children ruled my life,...

Most of them don’t know what communism is, could not pick it out of a lineup. They only know what anticommunism is. The two are practically unrelated.

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life...

I don’t see why you’re not just going for this.’ Dovey looked her in the eyes, in the mirror. ‘You are a rocket. You go for thing, Dellarobia. That is you. When did you ever...

She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they’re asked.

You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.

The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows

To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable-soup song, except that now there were people mixed in with the beans and potatoes: Dwayne Ray, Mattie, Esperanza, Lou Ann and all the rest....

Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.

And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn’t really want to eat 700 more...

Why does a person spend money on a stamp to spout bile at a stranger?