Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.
You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.
In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had – a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they’d sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn’t occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.
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.
She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.
There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true, but you haven’t told anyone yet.
We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.
When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.
What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.
Maybe he’s been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.
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.
If you never stepped on anybody’s toes, you never been for a walk.
For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.
He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.
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.
Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.
A flower is a plant’s way of making love.