She made it plain that her fondest wish was to have a grandbaby. Whenever fat Irene would pick up the baby, which was not too often, Mrs. Hoge would declare, “Irene, you don’t know how becoming that looks.” As if someone ought to have a kid because it looked good on them.
A mother’s unfulfilled ambitions lie heaviest on her daughters.
If people really gave it full consideration, I mean, like if you could return a baby after thirty days’ examination like one of those Time-Life books, then I figure the entire human species would go extinct in a month’s time.
How would you even begin to make a hush puppy, what in the world was in one? Nothing to do with a puppy, surely. Garnett had long known, though he didn’t much like to admit it, that God’s world and the better part of daily life were full of mysteries known only to women.
Really it was her mother she’d wanted to call right after the bad news, or in the middle of it, while Mr. Petrofaccio was blowing his nose. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, whenever a fight with Tig left her in pieces, it had been her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.
Her name, he says like the Lord’s taken in vain. Sometimes he says “Mexico,” and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it.
Zeke embodied the contradiction of his generation: jaded about the fate of the world, idealistic about personal prospects.
Beautiful people liked to claim looks didn’t matter, while throwing that currency around like novice bank robbers.
When I’m in a blue mood, I head for the kitchen. I turn the pages of my favorite cookbooks, summoning the prospective joyful noise of a shared meal. I stand over a bubbling soup, close my eyes, and inhale. From the ground up, everything about nourishment steadies my soul.
The guys in charge of everything right now are so old. They really are, Mom. Older than you. They figured out the meaning of life in, I guess, the nineteen fifties and sixties. When it looked like there would always be plenty of everything. And they’re applying that to now. It’s just so ridiculous.
After a while Estevan said, “What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere.
When men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that’s going to change the whole wide world.
He got born in the historical moment of no more free lunch. Friends will probably count more than money, because wanting too much stuff is going to be toxic.
I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose.
Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Matthew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonsense to us now. All that foot washing, for example. Was it really for God’s glory or just to keep the sand out of the house?
The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.
I knew Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floors, so I did what I could.
There’s nothing like living as a refugee in one’s own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist.
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.
I do understand that they fall when I’m least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another.