You know what really gets me?” I asked him. “How people call you ‘illegals.’ That just pisses me off, I don’t know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?
At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them. Step one, probably, is to live on the land that feeds them, or at least on the same continent, ideally the same region. Step two is to be able to countenance the ideas of “food” and “dirt” in the same sentence, and three is to start poking into one’s supply chain to learn where things are coming from.
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
It’s terrible to lose somebody,” I said, “I mean, I don’t know firsthand, but I can imagine it must be. But it’s also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that’s got to be so much worse.
I realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.
I didn’t wish to be comforted. “You can’t replace people you love with other people,” I said. “They’re not like old shoes or something.” “No. But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.
Religion has no place in the science classroom, where it may abridge students’ opportunities to learn the methods, discoveries, and explanatory hypotheses of science. Rather, its place is in the hearts of the men and women who study and then practice scientific exploration. Ethics can’t influence the outcome of an experiment, but they can serve as a useful adjunct to the questions that get asked in the first place, and to the applications thereafter.
It is in his absence I prosper.
When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.
Most people lived so far from it, they thought you could just choose, carnivore or vegetarian, without knowing that the chemicals on grain and cotton killed far more butterflies and bees and bluebirds and whippoorwills than the mortal cost of a steak or a leather jacket.
I knew exactly what I should have said: Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.
I’m out of the habit. I’ve spent years trying not to want. Just, you know, as an endeavor, like quitting smoking.
It only we could recover faith in a seed – and in all the other complicated marvels that can’t fit in a sound bite. Then we humans might truly know the glory of knowing our place.
Sal Monelli was an unfortunate fellow whose name had struck such terror in her heart she forbade him to touch any food item that wasn’t sealed and crated. Lou Ann’s life was ruled by the fear of salmonella, to the extent that she claimed the only safe way to eat potato salad was to stick your head in the refrigerator and eat it in there.
Hope it an unbearably precious thing, worth its weight in feathers. If that’s too much to think about, best to tuck it in a pocket anyway, and make it a habit.
She told him television was a bad influence. Probably she was right. Like those white birds he’s been seeing outside the window, it flashes its wings and promises whatever you want, even before you knew you wanted it.
For God’s sake, man,” Ovid nearly shouted, “the damn globe is catching fire, and the islands are drowning. The evidence is staring them in the face.
Iano ordered her back to Ivins to finish her degree in biology. Willa wondered when he would notice Tig was immune to his directives. Tig informed her parents she refused to take out bank loans, with tuition exchange no longer an option, and anyway she’d already learned more than she wanted to know about a ravaged biosphere. The latter was no news to Willa, who’d seen how the girl always took the truth of human selfishness harder than any of her friends, even the history majors.
He crossed his arms over the chair back and smirked his disapproval at Brother Fowles. “Sir, I offer you my condolences. Personally I’ve never been troubled by any such difficulties with interpreting God’s word.” “Indeed, I see that,” Brother Fowles said.
You can’t let your heart go bad like that, like sour milk. There’s always a chance you’ll want to use it later.