She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.
It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another’s shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.
Who is the brave man – he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.
I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.
We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don’t have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.
I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled.
Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.
If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.
If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.
And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.
Instead of idleness, vanity, or an intellect formed by the spoon-feeding of others, my girls have acquired energy, industry, and independence.
I’m a praying atheist. When I hear an ambulance siren, I ask for a blessing for those people in trouble, knowing that no one’s listening. I think it’s just a habit of mindfulness.
Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn’t and you have to push it down and start again, but you don’t stop; it’s your trade.
The day in 2004 when the radiologist told me I had invasive cancer, I walked down the hospital corridor looking for a phone to call my husband, and I could almost see the fear coming toward me like a big, black shadow.
Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.
I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.
Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?
The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads.
They say the Lord’s Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.
My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I’m more your paragraph kind of gal.