They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

she's never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace

Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.

We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces, and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel.