When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven

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

Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.

To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.