I never think that anything I’m writing is bluntly political in any way. I’m not going for commentary.
I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you’ll be labeled a political writer.
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.
Small change, small wonders – these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.
To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct – crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!
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.
Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.
Terms like that, ‘Humane Society,’ are devised with people like me in mind, who don’t care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can’t imagine what kind of writer I’d be if I didn’t have my kids.
Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
The reason most people have kids is because they get pregnant.
What keeps you going isn’t some fine destination but just the road you’re on, and the fact that you know how to drive.
In the places that call me out, I know I’ll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.