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.
Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.
The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.
Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.
How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.
Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
But I’ve swallowed my pride before, that’s for sure. I’m practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.
You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I’m midway through a book before it happens. However, I don’t wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I’m not delivering lambs on the farm.
Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I’ve only found sorrow.
Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.
Morning always comes.
There’s such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it’s like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.
Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.