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...

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You’ve been torn asunder, invested...

I never learn anything from listening to myself (Ovid Byron, in Flight Behavior)

Pay attention to your dreams; when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you’ve come home you’ll dream of where you were. It’s a kind of jet...

But I’ll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every...

Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

Everyone wants the tallest tree to fall

Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus…. Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a...

No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.

I know what it is: it’s a green mamba snake away up in the tree. You don’t have to be afraid of them anymore because you are one. They lie so still on the tree...

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.