Autumn darkness had already blinded the dining room windows, an effect that dispirited him, no matter how many autumns he lived or how predictably the light receded.
Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot.
Eaters must understand,” Wendell Berry writes, “that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.
After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. – WALLACE STEVENS, “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard.
No, you shouldn’t. But you are here, so yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world than no and yes.
She wondered if humiliation ever ran its natural course and peeled off, like a sunburn, or just kept blazing.
And I have no idea how to be kind to myself. Living, as a general enterprise, seems unkind beyond belief.
Overweight children are a demographic in many ways similar to minors addicted to cigarettes, with one notable exception: their parents are usually their suppliers.
The final stages of grief. Dellarobia felt an entirely new form of panic as she watched her son love nature so expectantly, wondering if he might be racing toward a future like some complicated sand castle that was crumbling under the tide. She didn’t know how scientists bore such knowledge. People had to manage terrible truths.
When you were a child planting lilacs here with your mother, did you imagine the same honeyed scent, eight years later, waking someone like me in this house... or that you would finally show me hot to fall in love with the time on my hands, to plant flowers to outlive me?
So I am the one who quietly takes stock, I suppose. Believing in all things equally. Believing fundamentally in the right of a plant or a virus to rule the earth. Mother says I have no heart for my own kind. She doesn’t know. I have too much. I know what we have done, and what we deserve.
She was well accustomed to watching Yankee brains grind their gears, attempting to reconcile a hillbilly accent with signs of a serious education.
Living takes life. But it can be thoughtful. A little bit humble about the necessity, maybe. You can consider the costs of your various choices.
So much of life with infirmity came down to dignity and will.
Crisis is opportunity.
The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
I think most of humankind would agree, the hard part of high school is the people.
It’s safer knowing more about people than they know about you.
I felt the kindliness of the moss, which is all over everywhere once you get out of the made world. God’s flooring. All the kinds, pillowy, pin-cushiony, shag carpet. Gray sticks of moss with red heads like matchsticks. Some tiny dead part of me woke up to the moss and said, Man. Where you been.
At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.