The best artifact was the calendar of the ancients, a great carved piece of stone as big as a kitchen, circular, bolted to the wall like a giant clock. In the center was an angry face looking out, as if he’d come through that stone from some other place to have a look at us, and not very pleased about it.
He asked me if the alligator was a national symbol of the United States, because you saw them everywhere on people’s shirts, just above the heart.
Sometimes that happens. Children can be your heartache. But that doesn’t matter, you have to go on and have them,” she said. “It works out.
Scientists are not like other people, sir. We cannot slam our portals. We have to follow evidence where it leads, even if no one likes that place. Even if it suggests that all we have ever believed might be mistaken.
Oh, Rachel, Rachel,” Leah said. “Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of the nations, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that?
It was pretty clear there would be no stopping the Bullhorn, or someone like him. Here was the earthquake, the fire, flood, and melting permafrost, with everyone still grabbing for bricks to put in their pockets rather than walking out of the wreck and looking for light.
If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally she got it. The need for so many channels.
Several studies, including research done by Allison Byrum of the American Chemical Society, have shown fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides and herbicides to contain 50 to 60 percent more antioxidants than their sprayed counterparts.
The flatness was stultifying. She wouldn’t say this aloud because in light of other worries it seemed self-indulgent, but Willa missed mountains. Missed them hard, with the psychic equivalent of a toothache.
There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I’ll not live to see the meek inherit anything.
They rock against each other, holding on, and the birds in the forest raise their voices to drown out the secret of creation.
I’d forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn’t just stop at eye level.
The traffic was moving about the speed of a government.
There but for the grace of serotonin go the rest of us.
Thatcher wondered what task could be more wearisome than shoring up a stupid man’s confidence in his own wisdom.
When people run for their lives they frequently neglect to bring along their file cabinets of evidence,” she said. Mattie wasn’t often bitter but when she was, she was. I didn’t want to believe the world could be so unjust. But of course it was right there in front of my nose.
Thatcher thought Mary was not invisible, but as free as any woman could be. And in the grip of fresh discoveries, always.
Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.
He’s legitimizing personal greed as the principal religion of our country.
A red-tailed hawk rose high on an air current, calling out shrill, sequential rasps of raptor joy. She scanned the sky for another one. Usually when they spoke like that, they were mating. Once she’d seen a pair of them coupling on the wing, grappling and clutching each other and tumbling curve-winged through the air in hundred-foot death dives that made her gasp, though always they uncoupled and sailed outward and up again just before they were bashed to death in senseless passion.