From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn’t this world would end at once.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.
I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.
A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.
I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.
Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.
The thing is, it’s my own fault. I just can’t put up with a person that won’t go out of his way for me. And that’s what a man is. Somebody that won’t go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.
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.