One percent of the brotherhood has their hands on most of the bread. They own the country, their god is the free market, and most people are so unhorrified they won’t even question the system. If it makes a profit, that’s the definition of good. If it grows, you have to stand back and let it. The free market has exactly the same morality as a cancer cell.
The girl was compulsively honest. In earlier years, Willa’s every attempt to teach her the artful evasion known as “tact” would get shot down with “Mom, that’s lying!” And Tig remained the child who announced when opening gifts at birthday parties, “Thanks, Grandma, I have one of these already and I don’t really like it.
A taste for better stuff is cultivated only through experience.
All knowledge measured, first and last, by one’s allegiance to the teacher.
She laid the side of her face against his frail old heart, where the pink shell of her ear could capture whatever song it had left.
Tig was a unique element with all valences open.
As the storm moved closer it broke into hundreds of pieces so that the rain fell here and there from the high clouds in long, curving gray plumes. It looked like maybe fifty or sixty fires scattered over the city, except that the tall, smoky columns were flowing in reverse.
I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as if seized by the bird spirit, out on the driveway. The pea bowl rang like an insistent bell as we tossed in our peas.
Borders crumble; they won’t hold together on their own; we have to shore them up constantly. They are fortified and patrolled by armed guards, these fences that divide a party of elegant diners on one side from the children on the other whose thin legs curve like wishbones, whose large eyes peer through the barbed wire at so much food – there is no wall high enough to make good in such a neighborhood. For this, of course, is what the fences divide.
Except for her weak foundation. The ruin of many a girl, I guess.
The view from our garden is spectacular. I thought about people I knew who right at that moment might be plucking chickens, picking strawberries and lettuce, just for us. I felt grateful to the people involved, and the animals also. I don’t say this facetiously. I sent my thanks across the county, like any sensible person saying grace before a meal.
Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behavior in children, and medicate it in adults? That’s so random. It’s like this whole shady setup.
SUNRISE TANTALIZE, evil eyes hypnotize:.
The larger the corporation, the more distant its motives are apt to be from the original spirit of organic farming – and the farther the products will likely be shipped to buyers who will smile at the happy farm picture on the package, and never be the wiser.
It was a rule of marriage: the more desperately you needed alone time with your spouse, the quicker you’d spoil it with a blowout. When.
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Was this what they meant by hot flashes? But they didn’t feel hot. Her body felt full and heavy and slow and human and absent somehow, just a weight to be carried forward without its enthusiastic cycles of fertility and rest, the crests and valleys she had never realized she counted on so much. Dead weight? Was that what she was now; an obsolete female biding its time until death?
She never wore a watch, and for this she didn’t need one.
I don’t know where to start, Lou Ann,” I told her. “There’s just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they’re down – look what they do to those people at Mattie’s. To hell with them, people say, let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor or in trouble, or for not being white, or whatever, how dare they try to come to this country.
It’s a relief to share the uncomplicated affection that has passed between people and their dogs for thousands of years.