Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.

Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.

It's what you do that makes your soul.

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk.

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.