The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

If you can't dress expensive, dress memorable.

Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.