If the Lord hasn’t got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that’s his business.

These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their...

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.

A journalist’s job is to collect information,” Ovid said to Pete. “Nope,” Pete said. “That’s what we do. It’s not what they do.” Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like...

We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires.

What there is in this world I think is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout there sphere of influence. That’s pretty much the whole of what I can say looking...

The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we’d like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up with the rest...

That means you’re my kid,” I explained, “and I’m your mother, and nobody can say it isn’t so.

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It’s everyone’s, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.

People ask without wanting to know.

The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. Poultry, a significant part of the modern diet, is emblematic of...

That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that’s how they do it here. Maybe he’s been in Africa so long he’s forgotten that we Christians have...

Each food items in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles….If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce...

This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it...

Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read...

…I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them…

But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after – oh, that’s love by a different name. She...

People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

So she was what Hester called a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord.

You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It’s what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, ‘There, you sons of bitches, don’t lay a finger...

She has changed in this way that motherhood changes you, so that you forget you ever had time for small things like despising the color pink.

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

…animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.

Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.

Take your place, then. Look at what happened from every side and consider all the other ways it could have gone. Consider, even, an Africa unconquered altogether. Imagine those first Portuguese adventurers approaching the shore,...

Well, yeah,” Dovey said. “That’s America. We watch shows about rich people’s houses and their designer dresses and we drool. It’s patriotic.

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...