One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of them hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight. “Wow,” we all said – “what a good idea!” Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won’t put squash on the front seat. I used to think that was a joke.
The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air.
No one. I’m a pawn in this game. You’re always first to say how unimportant I am. But at least I will be the pawn who tells the truth.
Teaching struck Willa as a saintly calling, especially given the pay. But even saints shouldn’t be stuck with intro classes forever.
I knew it was only shadow and the angle of the sun, but still it’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story...
There seemed to be no end to the things that could be hiding, waiting it out, right where you thought you could see it all.
There’s people I love. But there’s so many other kinds of love, too. And people act so hateful to every kind but their own.
No matter what affronts of youthful insolence he had to face in his day, he’d still have that: he was a man taken care of by a woman.
Children – even when they have endured the unthinkable – have a gift for divining the moment when the grown-ups really need to lighten up.
In my first draft every sentence I put down is to advance the story. Each subsequent draft – the 3rd, the 7th, the 27th – is trying to turn each of those sentences into a poem.
In our darkest hours we may find comfort in the age-old slogan from the resistance movement, declaring that we shall not be moved. But we need to finish that sentence. Moved from where? Are we anchoring to the best of what we’ve believed in, throughout our history, or merely to an angry new mode of self-preservation? The American moral high ground can’t possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses.
The pale-skinned boy stood shivering in water up to his waist, thinking these were the most awful words in any language: You will be surprised. The moment when everything is about to change.
To have been made the creatures we are is a marvel. If the process required millennia rather than seven days, how can it be any less sublime?
I am looking for the door to another world. I’ve waited thousands of years. Take me.
No rational guidelines existed for comparing youthful freedom with the heart-enlarging earthquake of family life.
We’re chalk and cheese. Somebody ought to do a study on us, if they want to know how kids in the same family can turn out totally different.
It ran deeper than that. I’d lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay. Hallie could call that attitude a crutch, but she didn’t know, she hadn’t loved and lost so deeply. As Loyd said, she’d never been born – not into life as I knew it. Hallie could still risk everything.
Of course the scientist’s position is subordinate. Our task is to make our fussy natures invisible against the mechanisms of the universe. Truth is not ours to find within, but to search out. We study the known world in order to recognize the remarkable.
But from here on in I’m your Ma, and that means I love you the most. Forever.