Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
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.
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.