Favorite Quotes:

“And yet I never cease to long in my bones for what I left behind. I open my eyes on every new day expecting that a creek will run through my backyard under broad-leafed maples, and that my mother will be whistling in the kitchen. Behind the howl of coyotes, I’m listening for meadowlarks. I sometimes ache to be rocked in the bosom of the blood relations and busybodies of my childhood.”

“In a city of half a million I still really look at every face, anticipating recognition, because I grew up in a town where every face meant something to me. I have trouble remembering to lock doors. Wariness of strangers I learned the hard way. When I was new to the city, I let a man into my house one hot afternoon because he seemed in dire need of a drink of water; when I turned from the kitchen sink I found sharpened steel shoved against my belly. And so I know, I know. But I cultivate suspicion with as much difficulty as I force tomatoes to grow in the drought-stricken hardpan of my strange backyard. No creek runs here, but I’m still listening to secret tides, living as if I belonged to an earlier place: not Kentucky, necessarily, but a welcoming earth and a human family. A forest. A species.“

“What does it mean, anyway, to be an animal in human clothing?”

“We humans have to grant the presence of some past adaptations, even in their unforgivable extremes, if only to admit they are permanent rocks in the stream we’re obliged to navigate. It’s easy to speculate and hard to prove, ever, that genes control our behaviors. Yet we are persistently, excruciatingly adept at many things that seem no more useful to modern life than the tracking of tides in a desert. At recognizing insider/outsider status, for example, starting with white vs. black and grading straight into distinctions so fine as to baffle the bystander – Serb and Bosnian, Hutu and Tutsi, Crip and Blood. We hold that children learn discrimination from their parents, but they learn it fiercely and well, world without end. Recite it by rote like a multiplication table. Take it to heart, though it’s neither helpful nor appropriate, anymore than it is to hire the taller of two men applying for a position as a bank clerk, though statistically we’re likely to do that too. Deference to the physical superlative, a preference for the scent of our own clan: a thousand anachronisms dance down the strands of our DNA from a hidebound tribal past, guiding us toward the glories of survival, and some vainglories as well. If we resent being bound by these ropes, the best hope is to seize them out like snakes, by the throat, look them in the eye and own up to their venom.”

“We can dress up our drives, put them in three-piece suits or ballet slippers, but they drive us. The wonder of it is that our culture attaches almost unequivocal shame to our animal nature, believing brute urges must be hurtful, violent things.”

“Want is a thing that unfurls, unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind.”

“In the best of times, I hold in mind the need to care for things beyond the self: poetry, humanity, grace. In other times, when it seems difficult merely to survive and be happy about it, the condition of my thought tastes as simple as this: let me be a good animal today.”

“Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.“

“It’s not such a wide gulf to cross, then, from survival to poetry.”

“We revel in our misery only because we know the end, when it comes, is so good. One day there will be a crackling, clean, creosote smell in the air and the ground will be charged and the hair on your arms will stand on end and then BOOM, you are thrillingly drenched. All the desert toads crawl out of their burrows, swell out their throats, and scream for sex while the puddles last. The ocotillos leaf out before your eyes, like a nature show on fast forward. There is so little time before the water sizzles back to thin air again. So little time to live a whole life in the desert. This is elemental mortality, the root of all passion.”

“Ownership is an entirely human construct. At some point people got along without it. Many theorists have addressed the question of how private property came about, and some have gone so far as to suggest this artificial notion has led us into a mess of trouble. They aren’t talking about personal property, like a toothbrush or a digging stick to call one’s own, which has probably always been a human tradition. Even a bird, after all, has its nest, and chimpanzees in a part of central Africa where there’s a scarcity of nut-smashing tools are known to get possessive about their favorite rocks. But to own land, plants, other animals, more stuff than we need – that is the peculiar product of a modern imagination.”

“I’m told that nine-tenths of human law is about possession.”

“Engels remarked at the end of his treatise that the outgrowth of property has become so unmanageable that “the human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation.” But he continues on a hopeful note: “The time which has passed since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come… A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind.”

“Time and again I find myself writing love letters to my rural origins.“

“If there is a fatal notion on this earth, it’s the notion that wider horizons will be fatal.“

“Behind the nostalgic call for women to return to tidying up the cottage is the supposition that some burly fellow will always be there to keep the wolf from the door. This fairy tale has lost its powers of persuasion. Half of all marriages undertaken since 1960 didn’t last for the anticipated eternity. It’s been a great disenchantment for all in the magic kingdom, no doubt, but the statistics on what follows are a shock that gets your feet back on the ground: after divorce, a man’s expendable income is overwhelmingly likely to increase, while a woman’s plummets, along with her children’s standard of living. The reason for this is clear enough. Hours logged on Kinder and kitchen don’t add up to tenure and a retirement plan.”

“Standards of beauty in every era are things that advertise, usually falsely: “I’m rich and I don’t have to work.”

“My father pointed at the cloudbank and told me it was Africa. I couldn’t begin to imagine the life that was rolling out ahead of me. But I did understand it would pass over me with the force of a river, and that I needed to pin the water to its banks and hold it still, somehow, to give myself time to know it. I could think of only one way to do that, and I’ve thought of no better way since. I cracked the spine of the diary I’d received as a Christmas present and began the self-conscious record of my life with this block-lettered sentence:

“When I first saw Africa I thought it was a cloud.””

“More to the point: who exactly is entitled to write books about relationships between women and men? Hermaphrodites? This is the dilemma upon whose horns I’ve built my house: I want to know, and to write, about the places where disparate points of view rub together – the spaces between. Not just between man and woman but also North and South; white and non-white; communal and individual; spiritual and carnal. I can think of no genetic or cultural credentials that could entitle a writer to do this – only a keen ear, empathy, caution, willingness to be criticized, and a passionate attraction to the subject.”

“To love life, really, must mean caring not only for the garden plot but also the wilderness beyond the fence, beauty and mystery for their own sake, because of how meager a world would be without them.”

“Few U.S. citizens are aware, for example, that our government has routinely engineered assassinations of democratically elected heads of state in places like Chile and Guatemala, and replaced them with such monstrous confederates as Augusto Pinochet and Castillo Armas. Why do those dictators’ names fail even to ring a bell in most red-blooded American heads? Possibly because our heads are too crowded with names like O.J. and Tonya. The guilt for that may not rest entirely with the producers or the consumers, btu the crime has nevertheless occurred. To buy or to sell information as nothing more than a consumer product, like soda pop, is surely wrong. Marketed in that way, information’s principal attribute must be universal palatability.”

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the race,” Percy Shelley said. They are also its margin of safety, like the canaries that used to be carried into mines because of their sensitivity to toxic gases; their silence can be taken as a sign of imminent danger.”

“The power of fiction is to create empathy.”

“We didn’t evolve to cope with tragedy on a global scale. Our defense is to pretend there’s no thread of event that connects us, and that those lives are somehow not precious and real like our own. It’s a practical strategy, to some ends, but the loss of empathy is also the loss of humanity, and that’s no small tradeoff.”

“The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.” – Ursula K Le Guin