The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a dis….

For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work he….

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

Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place..

You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own..

It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future..

If I had to give up my life for anything, it would have to have the resilience of hope, the elation of new literacy, the brilliant life of a field of….

It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else..

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market..

Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least..

The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment..

Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature..

The things I carry closest to my heart are things I can't own..

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And e….

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..

Everything truly important is washable..

When the scope of the problem seems insuperable, isn't it time to call this one, give it up, and get on with life as we know it. I do know that answe….

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science..

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most h….

Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure..

A flower is your cousin...Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it...But nobody is so hungry they need….