As to the career of avoiding making enemies. You can’t dig any burrow deep enough. Might as well stand and look them in the eye.
Our journey was to be a great enterprise of balance. My father, of course, was bringing the Word of God – which fortunately weighs nothing at all.
Really it’s just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club. How long can that last? Five or six more years?
White is not an origin. It’s a mental construct of privilege.
One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs...
First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.
Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.
It’s funny how people don’t give that much thought to what kids want, as long as they’re being quiet.
The part of my soul that is driven to make stories is a fierce thing, like a ferret: long, sleek, incapable of sleep, it digs and bites through all I know of the world.
Was it normal now for parents to operate in the dark? She never knew what was fair to ask.
To stand in the clear light of day, you once said. Unsheltered.
They saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom.
One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of them hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight. “Wow,” we all said – “what a good idea!” Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won’t put squash on the front seat. I used to think that was a joke.
The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air.
No one. I’m a pawn in this game. You’re always first to say how unimportant I am. But at least I will be the pawn who tells the truth.
Teaching struck Willa as a saintly calling, especially given the pay. But even saints shouldn’t be stuck with intro classes forever.
I knew it was only shadow and the angle of the sun, but still it’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story...
There seemed to be no end to the things that could be hiding, waiting it out, right where you thought you could see it all.
There’s people I love. But there’s so many other kinds of love, too. And people act so hateful to every kind but their own.