Once the rains abated, my father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper.

A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't this world would end at once.

You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, 'There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.'" "But any country is still in the making. Always. That's just history, people have to see that.

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.

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

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.