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.
What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.
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.
Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It’s everyone’s, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.
To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.
What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it.
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 right in it, under its roof.
Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
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.
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.
Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.
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.
I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.
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 and rises; another god expires.
A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.
If the Lord hasn’t got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that’s his business.
Science doesn’t tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.
I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true, but you haven’t told anyone yet.
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
Your blood for mine. If not these, then those. War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation.
The room looks as if a giant dog after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere.
The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.
If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
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 one of those. We don’t bend anything.
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.
…whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And peace will be with you.
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 our own system of marriage, and it’s called Monotony.
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 calories a day.
Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.
When you’re given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven
God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.
There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
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.
There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad…Sadness is more or less like a head cold — with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
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 next.
I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
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 lost a child,” she said, meeting Lusa’s eyes directly. “I thought I wouldn’t live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
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 substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.
The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows
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.
What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.
We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires.
…The question is, why do you think you can’t be a writer?””To be a writer, you need readers.””I’m no painter, then. Who ever looks at my little dumb pieces of shit?
She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they’re asked.
Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
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 lag of the consciousness.
Why does a person spend money on a stamp to spout bile at a stranger?
…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 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.
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.
As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that’s set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda.
Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.
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, a mother recalls the measure of the silences.
Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot.
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 spl
When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.
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.
In Bobby Ogle’s version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.
She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.
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.
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?
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.
That is surely childhood’s end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: “Nobody else is going to do this.
The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt.
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.
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.
…animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.
Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.
A mother’s body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it’s own entreaties to body and soul.
You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.
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.
That means you’re my kid,” I explained, “and I’m your mother, and nobody can say it isn’t so.
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 day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.
Some of life’s greatest calls were answered not by the head but by the body.
This will be Great Mam’s last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.
Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.
…when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.
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.
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.
Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.
The urge to lie is produced by the contradictions in our lives. We are made to declare love for our country, while it tramples our rights and dignity.
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.
No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.
How does an artist learn enough about life to fill a thimble?””Soli, I’m going to tell you. He needs to go rub his soul against life. …
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?
It’s a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.
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.
Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers.
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 the world.
Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew.
Love changes everything. I never suspected it would be so. Requited love, I should say …
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
It’s what you do that makes your soul not the other way around.
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
The very least you can do in your life is to 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 right in it under its roof.
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
The very least you can do in your life is to 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 right in it, under its roof.
People’s dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It’s what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.
What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.
Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that’s brave. I never get over being thankful for that – for the courage of my readers.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you’ll be labeled a political writer.
You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I’m midway through a book before it happens. However, I don’t wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I’m not delivering lambs on the farm.
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.