I shrugged. “I saw a Star Trek episode one time that was along those lines. All the women on this whole planet end up naked. I can’t remember exactly, but I think Captain Kirk gets turned into a pipe wrench.
Cars with flames painted on the hood might get more speeding tickets. Are the flames making the car go fast? No. Certain things just go together. And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.
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. What I want is almost so simple I can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.
The women of his family would become one with the earth’s creatures only by pressing the bones of whales against their rib cages until breathless.
Cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. The gains are quantifiable. Cooking and eating at home – even with quality ingredients – costs pennies on the dollar compared with meals prepared by a restaurant or factory.
I don’t know how you go on, but I really hope you’ll keep doing it. That you won’t give up esperanza. I thought of that last night. Esperanza is all you get, no second chances. What you have to do is try and think of reasons to stick it out.
A hundred different paths may lighten the world’s load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.
You from out of town?” he asked after a while, eying my car. “No,” I said. “I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate.” I didn’t like his looks.
One percent of the brotherhood has their hands on most of the bread. They own the country, their god is the free market, and most people are so unhorrified they won’t even question the system. If it makes a profit, that’s the definition of good. If it grows, you have to stand back and let it. The free market has exactly the same morality as a cancer cell.
The girl was compulsively honest. In earlier years, Willa’s every attempt to teach her the artful evasion known as “tact” would get shot down with “Mom, that’s lying!” And Tig remained the child who announced when opening gifts at birthday parties, “Thanks, Grandma, I have one of these already and I don’t really like it.
A taste for better stuff is cultivated only through experience.
All knowledge measured, first and last, by one’s allegiance to the teacher.
She laid the side of her face against his frail old heart, where the pink shell of her ear could capture whatever song it had left.
Tig was a unique element with all valences open.
As the storm moved closer it broke into hundreds of pieces so that the rain fell here and there from the high clouds in long, curving gray plumes. It looked like maybe fifty or sixty fires scattered over the city, except that the tall, smoky columns were flowing in reverse.
I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as if seized by the bird spirit, out on the driveway. The pea bowl rang like an insistent bell as we tossed in our peas.
Borders crumble; they won’t hold together on their own; we have to shore them up constantly. They are fortified and patrolled by armed guards, these fences that divide a party of elegant diners on one side from the children on the other whose thin legs curve like wishbones, whose large eyes peer through the barbed wire at so much food – there is no wall high enough to make good in such a neighborhood. For this, of course, is what the fences divide.
Except for her weak foundation. The ruin of many a girl, I guess.
The view from our garden is spectacular. I thought about people I knew who right at that moment might be plucking chickens, picking strawberries and lettuce, just for us. I felt grateful to the people involved, and the animals also. I don’t say this facetiously. I sent my thanks across the county, like any sensible person saying grace before a meal.
Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behavior in children, and medicate it in adults? That’s so random. It’s like this whole shady setup.