Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
— Barbara Kingsolver
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
