Homeland and Other Stories

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

As I looked at her there among the pumpkins I was overcome with the color and the intesity of my life. In these moments we are driven to try and hoard happiness by taking photographs, but I know better. The improtant thing was what the colors stood for, the taste of hard apples and the existence of Lena and the exact quality of the sun on the last warm day in October. A photograph would have flattened the scene into a happy moment, whereas what I felt was rapture. The fleeting certainty that I deserved this space I'd been taking up on this earth, and all the air I had breathed.

Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.

It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with.

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.

She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.

Sometimes that happens. Children can be your heartache. But that doesn’t matter, you have to go on and have them,” she said. “It works out.

It's a relief to share the uncomplicated affection that has passed between people and their dogs for thousands of years.

Over the phone, her laughter sounded like a warm bath.

I loved the time spent with him, but felt in some other chamber of my heart that it was time wasted. That I ought to be doing something else while there was time.

I don't know," Magda says, "Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon.