The experiences I recollect seem to have been pressed or written into me; their presence is as emphatic as a scar.

It can be illuminating, I’ve found, to think of an individual sentence, divorced from its context, as an emblem for the mind of its author—how clearly or imaginatively he observes the world and what announces itself to his thoughts or his senses.

Here in middle Tennessee, fall has failed to take hold for longer than usual.

The more I write, the more I realize that my preoccupations don’t really go away.

Now that August has come and gone, we've put together a reading list for those last few dog days of summer.

Our future is unquestionably in peril. There is real work to be done, sooner than we’d like.

The moment captured in this paragraph is not simply a disagreement, but a crossroads wherein the two sisters decide what kind of people they will be to each other.

Disappointment is a dissatisfaction with the present that has us blame the past, but I increasingly believe in the potential for future joy.

Both women have developed the slightly terrifying habit of projecting their own lacks—from childhood, from their current lives—onto their own children and the children of others. This dynamic, of the child as a white wall onto which an adult might project fantasies and grievances, is, in my opinion, very common in life, if unconscious.