Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they’re feeling because that’s how I read the seed catalogs in January.
Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.
You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don’t attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.
Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
Don’t wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.
The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.
Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.
If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.
It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it “intently political.” I’m just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.