That was one of the things she held against missionaries: how they stressed Christ's submission to humiliation, and so had conditioned the people of Africa to humiliation by the white man

People give one another things that can't be gift wrapped.

A desert is a place without expectation.

Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.