Even the ordinary business of cleaning house seemed somehow to have become sacramental.

This morning, light lapped the water as if God had spilt a goblet of molten gold upon a ground of darkest velvet.

You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.

As that ripe summer turned to autumn, the sunlight cooled to a slantwise gleam, bronzing the beach grass and setting the beetle-bung trees afire.

I reached for her, pushing back the fall of hair-it was heavy and thick and smooth to the touch-and tilted her chin so that the moonlight shone on her wet face. We married each other...

Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more...

[The haggadah] was made to teach, and it will continue to teach. And it might teach a lot more than just the Exodus story.”What do you mean?”Well, from what you’ve told me, the book has...

All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound...

Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral.

Who is the brave man–he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.

I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.

I do think he hated him as one man will hate another who draws off the affection of a beloved.

I wonder where he lies. Wedged under a rock, with a thousand small mouths already sucking on his spongy flesh. Or floating still, on and down, on and down, to wider, calmer reaches of the...

At fifteen, I have taken up the burdens of a woman, and have come to feel I am one. Furthermore, I am glad of it. For I now no longer have the time to fall...

Strip by strip the lash carved into Grace’s shuddering flesh. My tears were falling by then, heavy drops, joining in the leaf dust with the blood that had begun to trickle from the table. My...

To know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know a man’s mind.

Are there any two words in all of the English language more closely twinned than courage and cowardice? I do not think there is a man alive who will not yearn to possess the former...

Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid...

He walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation. I learned to shape my mouth to the words—sasumuneash for cranberry, tunockuquas for frog. So many things grew and lived here that were strange...

For to know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know his mind.

She was quick of mind and swift of tongue, always ready to answer a set down with the kind of witty rebuke most of us can think of only long after the moment of insult...

It is a great thing to be young and to live without pain. And yet it is a blessing few of us count until we lose it.

Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color...

From “Caleb’s Crossing”–This is an excellent thought about family though it doesn’t apply to me. I am lucky in my brothers.”Now, of all times in my life, did I wish Caleb truly was my brother,...

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

It didn’t take me long out there, in the landscapes my father had painted, to realize that as much as I loved my country [Australia], I barely knew it. I’d spent so many years studying...

I am not a hero. Life has not required it of me.