Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can’t turn you away.
May God watch over your soul, which no man may abuse.
Many of Juan Diego’s demons had been his childhood companions-he knew them so well, they were as familiar as friends.
Juan Diego lived there, in the past – reliving, in his imagination, the losses that had marked him.
Real life is too sloppy a model for good fiction,” Juan Diego had said.
Homer Wells, listening to Big Dot Taft, felt like her voice – dulled. Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he’d so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without noticing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?
Homer and Candy passed by the empty and brightly lit dispensary; they peeked into Nurse Angela’s empty office. Homer knew better than to peek into the delivery room when the light was on. From the dormitory, they could hear Dr. Larch’s reading voice. Although Candy held tightly to his hand, Homer was inclined to hurry – in order not to miss the bedtime story.
The student and the teacher had contrasting ideas about the sentence, which was: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
It’s long been a point of mine that the freedom of religion, which this country alleges to support, works two ways. We’re not only free to practice the religion of our choice, we should be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.
Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love.
It’s as if you’ve been shot in the heart, Bill, but you’re unaware of the hole or the loss of blood. I doubt you even heard the shot!
Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy.
He was asleep – he was still dreaming – though his lips were moving. No one heard him; no one hears a writer who’s writing in his sleep.
There were some very good books in the backseat of the little Volkswagen; good books were the best protection from evil that Pepe had actually held in his hands – you could not hold faith in Jesus in your hands, not in quite the same way you could hold good books.
The way you remember or dream about your loved ones – the ones who are gone – you can’t stop their endings from jumping ahead of the rest of their stories. You don’t get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind – in your dreams, in your memories – sometimes the story begins with the epilogue.
Flor and Juan Diego and Lupe were the Iowan’s projects; Edward Bonshaw saw them through the eyes of a born reformer, but he did not love them less for looking upon them in this fashion.
What Brother Pepe saw in Edward Bonshaw was a man who looked like he belonged – like a man who had never felt at home, but who’d suddenly found his place in the scheme of things.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
A book feels true when it feels true,” she said to him, impatiently. “A book’s true when you can say, ‘Yeah! That’s just how damn people behave all the time.
It was not out of love that I wanted to meet my father, but out of the darkest curiosity – to be able to recognize, in myself, what evil I might be capable of.