embrace the cards you are dealt or it will eat you alive. If you go to the heart of your own matter, you will find only by loving and helping do you have peace from your own trauma.

We would like to think we have health care that incidentally involves some wealth transfer; what we actually have is wealth transfer that incidentally involves some health care.

both Sleeping and Snow attracted the attentions of princes with necrophiliac leanings.

the great curse of Euro-American history is its shallowness, its failure to take root in a place so different from its place of origin.

If I spent years clawing toward sunlight from the bottom of a dry well, that summer I looked over the edge for the first time and saw my sister.

Somewhere out there exists a home not paid for with blood.

A Muir Woods park ranger once remarked to me that she saw in these structures the great redwood forests that had been cut down to build them, and so those tall groves up and down the coast were another ghostly presence.

Historically, much of Earth exploration has been rooted in colonialism and subjugation. What kind of remnant legacies and unexamined assumptions thread through today’s discussions to colonize Mars?

history is what it is. it knows what it did.

There is no fellowship in Hell, the only relationship possible is that of tormenting one another.

I felt that I’d been here before, had walked into these grassy slopes on a sunny day, horses in the distance lifting their heads, watching me pass. Wildflowers would have been blowing in a warm breeze.

trees! y’all! they look like slow green explosions!

For I will consider my boyfriend Jeffrey. For he is an atheist but makes room for the unseen, unsayable. For he is a vegetarian but makes room for half-off Mondays at the conveyor belt sushi place.

“It’s normal to feel conflict. You were part of something for a long time. You hate it, and it was a terrible thing. But it created you, and you were part of it.”

Karen, meanwhile, tried to disentangle herself from Nellie’s conception of her as a “best friend,” but it was like trying to get gum out of your hair.

All of Northern California was a botanical garden, with wildflowers springing up between busy freeways and chamomile thriving in sidewalk cracks.

We talked less and less, and I felt it, how easy it was to lose people

Cities are juxtaposition engines, instruments for bringing people and things together.

She had spoken such words often but, always before, the harshness had been cut by an exasperation in her voice that betrayed affection. Now the tone, like the words, was only hard.

That failure of the sympathetic imagination, when it occurs between two people who have been intimate, is like natural disaster to me. It fills me with dread and amazement.

We thought because we were always talking we were connecting.

He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.