Literary Wanderings

We sometimes think that it was fortunate for him, and for our entire history, that Dúnia loved him for the brilliance of his mind, his nature being perhaps too selfish to inspire love by itself.

She believed my father wanted more children in order to entrap her, and she was basically right about that, although the entrapment in this case was only another word for love.

I don’t know if the Lord knows who I am, but I pray. When you pray you tell the Lord what He needs to do for you because you are weak and bad and can’t do things for yourself and then how much you will love Him if He does it.

I know it must be hard to see someone deliberately strip themselves of somethings that the world considers so beautiful, but these are the kind of things you find yourself doing when someone else matters so much more to you than you mean to yourself. Or don’t you remember feeling that way?

I tell him about what a promise is. So he will know what I am doing is the right and good thing. And once he knows that, then he will help.

Then I put one leg to the other side of the fence. The top of the fence grabs on to my skin under my dress and tries to stop me, tries to get me to stay on the wrong side. ... But I won’t let the fence keep me on the strong side. Because skin ripping isn’t something that will last forever, even though the hurting tries to tell you it will.

I changed my mind. Her last words and her best words.

The weeds take the life out of the plants, that’s why you kill them. The way you kill them is pull them out of the ground. They might tell you they want to stay in the ground and they might look pretty but you have to pull them out anyway. The farm is about taking the life from something and putting it somewhere else.

He was stronger than me because he was a good person. Something powerful inside him made him want to do the right thing.

Dryden is said to have translated his thoughts into Latin so that he could express them perfectly in English.

Together we repeatedly walked the perimeter of our land in those first months as landowners, pushing our way through the wilderness on the two sides that didn’t border the road, as if to walk it would seal it off from the rest of the world, make it ours. And, slowly, it did. Treees that had once looked like any other to me became as recognisable as the faces of old friends in a crowd, their branches gesturing with sudden meaning, their leaves beckoning like identifiable hands. Clumps of grass and the edges of the now-familiar bog became landmarks, guides, indecipherable to everyone but us.

We didn’t exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief, it because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two.

I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she’d been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought.

In spite of all this, I’d become a high school cheerleader and homecoming queen, and then I went off to college and became a left-wing feminist campus radical.

I noticed on the wall a gigantic seventeenth-century map of the globe. On the margins were sea monsters and dragons. For ages, cartographers had no means of knowing what existed on most of the earth. And more often than not these gaps were filled in with fantastical kingdoms and beasts, as if the make-believe, no matter how terrifying, were less frightening than the truly unknown.

Every quest, we are led to believe, had a romantic origin. Yet, even now, I can’t provide a good one for mine.

By then, most of the world had been explored, it’s veil of enchantment lifted, but the Amazon remained as mysterious as the dark side of the moon.