Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.

Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?

You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.

A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world....

a single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. and, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of...

There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.

They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks.Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes,...

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. Betrayal is a friend I have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back...

Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it’s the same amount...

For scientists, reality is not optional.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.

There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true, but you haven’t told anyone yet.

I looked hard out the window and understood suddenly that what I saw was full of color. A watercolor wash of summer light lay on the Catalina Mountains. The end of a depression is that...

He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can’t have will fit in a human hand.

A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.

Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.

The density of the butterflies in the air now gave her a sense of being underwater, plunged into a deep pond among bright fishes.

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.

I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. ‘Flour and sugar,’ she said, and then thought a bit. ‘Sometimes we’ll buy pretzels as a splurge.’It crossed my mind that the world’s...

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of...

When you’re given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven

But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.

Soon the maroon-throated howls would echo back from the other trees, father down the beach, until the whole jungle filled with roaring trees. As it was in the beginning, so it is every morning of...

If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

In Bobby Ogle’s version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.

On the hill behind her crows flew one by one into the bare trees, arranging their dark blots in the scrim of branches and adding their warnings to the drear sounds of this day. Gone,...

Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don’t tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute...

For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under,...

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you’re a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce...

The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live...

God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

But newspapers have a duty to truth,’ Van said.Lev clucked his tongue. ‘They tell the truth only as the exception. Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the...