the world opens up once you realise you’re never going to sort your life out

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkehead

My conversations helped me recognise a deeper issue, too, which is the way our ceaseless efforts to get into the driver’s seat of life seem to sap it of the very sense of aliveness that makes it worth living in the first place.

And I'm off to the convent

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

The fact was that Annabel was so disgusted by greed, by the ruination of the natural world because of it, that, like ascetics before her, the only action she could take was to remove herself, bit by bit, from the obscenity of this excess. 'Her suffering was an existential and a moral problem,' he said. 'Not a medical one.'

Her uncle was a stranger, but he had won the lottery

The Road to Tender Hearts

Some people will always ignore the sign, no matter how clear and direct it is.

He thinks things no one else thinks

The Dog of the South by Charles Portis

I asked him if he was going to British Honduras on vacation and he said, 'Vacation! Do you think I'm the kind of man who takes vacations?'

The need that triggered avalanches of compassion

The Antidote by Karen Russel

The plow that broke these plains was the plow that broke my family back in German-occupied Poland: the plow of empire. The plow that displaces and murders people, tearing them from their homes. The plow that levels more than tallgrass. The plow pushed by people like me.

We are still here

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal

For too long, most Americans didn't take oral history seriously, creating a mystery where there never was one. The question of who built these places and where they went are no mystery, O'odham elders and historians repeat: 'We've always lived here.'

A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief

Go As A River by Shelley Read

I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else, and doing this had delivered me here, with two fists of forest soil in my palms and a heart still learning to be unafraid of itself.

Then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?

inside me is a thundering arena

Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime. I hated my tool, the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people who, at the end of the day, had somehow persuaded life to put up with them all those years.