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.
A life was a life. She’d been orphaned at an age to internalize death as poor material for a joke. And likewise, salvation.
Everything, she wanted to scream at him, was a question of safety. All human endeavor bent itself to the same lost cause. Being kept inside a pumpkin shell your whole life was no guarantee against getting flung into space.
Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.
Moths must fly to his flame and perish gladly.
Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that’s no longer really about feeding anyone: in our own nation we export 1.1 million tons of potatoes, while we also import 1.4 million tons.
There will never be another Frida.
Cat, this is America, they let anybody vote. Crooks, wigs, even cookies like us. Dogs and cats, probably. Don’t take Fido to the polls, he might cancel you out.
Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
It’s terrible to lose somebody, but it’s also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that’s got to be so much worse.