“Like each of you, I took an alternative path to my high school diploma, and there were many moments along the way when graduation wasn’t guaranteed. My adolescence was—at best—turbulent and—at worst—pretty bleak. I didn’t think I’d ever emerge into an adult life where I had my own home, my own family, my own career, that list of accomplishments Matt just read. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d be around at all. I lived with my mom and dad; I had some friends, good ones even, and still—I felt deeply and utterly alone. ”

“I have a clear memory of reading Barnes’ book in the grass by the creek, sun overhead, the state’s famous sky shrunk by the mountains that rose up on either side of our small valley. Everything is conflated: the beauty of summer in Montana, the newness of what I was reading, the wide-open future in front of me. ”

“There was nothing specifically wrong with the photos, but I could feel their indecency. I’m sure Hallie felt it too.”

“If I could go back, I’d still say, ‘There’s no question that this is one of those times in history that we will all look back on. Your future grandkids will ask where you were during the COVID-19 outbreak. We will all be deeply affected by this; we will all know someone who dies. Everything is changing, and it’s going to change more.’ But I wouldn’t stop there.

I’d go on to say, ‘There is no question that this is huge, and we are lucky, but the collective magnitude of this pandemic doesn’t negate the individual magnitude of your life. And we measure our lives in celebrations, in birthdays and dances and graduations, in weddings and funerals. Each of those moments is a notch on the tally-board of your life. It is an acknowledgement that you are here. So, you go on and cry, my loves, and you mourn the loss of those celebrations, because they are losses. Significant memories are being lost before you’ve had a chance to make them, and that isn’t small.’”

“First-time novelists are often faced with questions about the truth of their books. There seems to be an unfair assumption that first books are inherently autobiographical in nature. I’ve watched colleagues and friends struggle against this phenomenon, but I’ve managed to avoid it nearly entirely. I believe this is because my debut novel is set in Alabama in the 1920s and 30s, at the dawn of rural electrification. It takes place on a farm and in a prison, and it’s written predominantly from the perspective of a man. On its face, it’s obviously not autobiographical. . . . That said, I am still there. My life—the deeply personal details of the thirty-seven years I’ve been around—imbues this book. I am everywhere, in fact, a subtle, pervasive haunting.”

“We are over the Rockies, Denver to Helena, a tiny plane half full. I get the second whiskey because the flight attendant asks if I want another before she closes out her till. No flight attendant has ever asked me this. I will always have another if offered.”

“Ursula was recently inducted into the Library of America, what the New York Times calls “the closest thing to immortality between hardcovers.” Usually restricting itself to dead, male greats such as Melville, Twain, and Hawthorne, Le Guin is only the second living writing to receive the honor. The library wanted to re-issue some of her well-known and much-loved science fiction, but Ursula fought for a collection of more obscure work. “There’s some innate arrogance here,” she says in an interview with The New York Times. “I want to do it my way. I don’t want to be reduced to being ‘the sci-fi writer.’ People are always trying to push me off the literary scene, and to hell with it…. I won’t be pushed.””

“The first pest to make itself known in the orchard was the stinkbug, malevolent and focused. It worked at the sap in the fruit, sucking the water from the flesh, leaving behind gnarls and distortions—catfacing, Mona heard it called, though the injured peaches she plucked from her 
trees’ branches looked nothing like a cat’s face, but more a woman’s, withered by sun. . . .”

“He wasn’t any good at it either. When she’d broken her arm at the park near their house, a sunny summer afternoon, after second grade, some freak fall from the monkey bars that gave her a compound fracture, bone boring out of the skin, he’d rushed to her, then turned away when he saw the damage, vomiting, unable to switch off the hardwire, to find a ground.”