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.
Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.
The last generation’s worst fears became the next one’s B-grade entertainment.
It’s as if cats live in a separate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of fascinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can’t see.
A woman without a man – a condition of ‘manlessness’ – is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.
A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.
Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.
The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.
What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?
The important thing isn’t the house. It’s the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go.
I’m widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I’m not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.