Being a peacock is not the only way to hide yourself, Frida. A pigeon can hide. – Lacuna.
Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don’t, but we wear it all the same. There’s only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?
Water, in Grace, is an all-or-nothing proposition, like happiness. When you have rain you have more than enough, just as when you’re happy and in love and content with your life, you can’t remember how you ever could have felt cheated by fate.
Even the bells from the churches have a conversation, all ringing at once.
Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth.
And all of us with our closed eyes smelled the frangipani blossoms in the big rectangles of open wall, flowers so sweet they conjure up sin or heaven, depending on which way you are headed.
I felt emptied-out and singing with echoes, unrecognizable to myself: that particular feeling like your own house on the day you move out.
That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that’s how they do it here. Maybe he’s been in Africa so long he’s forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it’s called Monotony.
I think maybe it is true that the idle mind is the Devil’s workshop.
You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist history rather than a spectator” Father Fernando Cardenal.
No one seemed to realize calculating sums requires only the most basic machinery and good concentration. Poetry is far more difficult. And palindromes, with their perfect, satisfying taste: Draw a level award! Yet it is always the thin gray grocery sums that make an impression.
We cater to the better class of gentile clientele. We reserve the right to decline service to anyone we deem to be incompatible.
I should like to write my books only for the dear person who lies awake reading in bed until page last, then lets the open book fall gently on her face, to touch her smile or drink her tears.
So Noah cursed all Ham’s children to be slaves forever and ever. That’s how come them to turn out dark.
The clock gulps softly, eating second whole while she waits...
Where you’d be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees!
When he marched to the altar, all the women in smart hats leaned away from the aisle, their long strands of pearls all swaying to one side as if the deck of a ship listed beneath them.
The sting of a fly, the Congolese say, can launch the end of the world. How simply things begin.
Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,′ he said. ‘We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.
One person’s picture postcard is someone else’s normal.