Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
The obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete.
This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulation of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable.
I never put real people into my fiction – I can’t see the slightest point of that, when I have the alternative of inventing utterly subservient slave-people, whose every detail of appearance and behavior I can bend to serve my theme and plot.
Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors – however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trouble.
He doesn’t even look at her because there is too much there, and he’s afraid. She is his first child, his favorite, every mistake he ever made.
It was a true conversation. About whether our ancestors had more important lives than we do. And how they’ve managed to trick us, if they did not.
Modern people are just like ancient ones, only more numerous.
Soon the maroon-throated howls would echo back from the other trees, father down the beach, until the whole jungle filled with roaring trees. As it was in the beginning, so it is every morning of the world.
Nobody had planted these flowers, I felt sure, nor harvested them either; these were works that the Lord had gone ahead and finished on His own. He must have lacked faith in mankind’s follow-through capabilities, on the day he created flowers.
I keep hoping some guy with ‘Ron’ or ‘Andy’ stitched on his pocket and a gas pump in his hand will step up and tell me where I’m headed.
The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment’s pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence.
My prior experience with young men was to hear them swear ‘Christ almighty in the craphouse!’ at any dress with too many buttons.
I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.
I felt the breath of God go cold against my skin.
It’s frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with.
In my opinion, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a greaty height.
I know how people are with their habits of mind... as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.
But I’ll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.
Peace and Love, get high and fly with the dove.