A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill..

...prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive w….

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me..

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healt….

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin..

Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves?.

He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves….

A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourse….

Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that ha….

It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known..

She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on..

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that c….

I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political..

After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth..

Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them..

But still, I’d be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to b….

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don't know..

I struggle with confidence, every time. I’m never completely sure I can write another book. Maybe my scope is too grand, my questions too hard, sure….

Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, com….

Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is..

You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No go….