Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.
The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.
If it’s important, your heart remembers.
All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.
I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.
Everything truly important is washable.
There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.
Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin...
Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It’s the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide.
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you’ll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can’t stand it.
It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.
It’s the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.
The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.