Sarah Malley

A problem with decisions between past and future was you made them in the present.

Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens

The blackbird remained as elusive as ever. Its abiding mysteriousness is one of the greatest bequests of my childhood. If I had thought for a moment that I had understood, it would have been a catastrophe. I might have ended up as an oilman, a banker, or a pimp. An early conviction of mastery or comprehension turns people into monsters. Those myste

What's an animal? It's a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists. What's a human? It's a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists—but a more stilted, stammering conversation than that of most wild animals. The conversations can become stories and acquire the shape and ta

So that was the season of light. Stooping always over it, like a schoolmaster trying to catch me out in an act of enjoyment, was the season of darkness.

I can no longer pretend that the winter is fine. I have tried to tell myself that the country is not dead, but resting and regrouping, stroking the inchoate life inside it, and that that's what is h

Adam named all the mammals and the birds—so forging a connection with them that went to the root of what both they and he were. His very first words were the names. We are shaped by the things we say and the labels we give. So Adam was shaped by his interactions with the animals. That interaction, and that shaping, are simple historical facts. We’v

Just as I'd put off the night river, I'd put off the sea. Both were like death. I am neither old enough nor young enough to write about the sea. It is both too big to be described and too basic to need description.

Charles Foster, Being a Beast

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on his side.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

We, too, know that winters are coming. For many of us it is the ruling fact: the whole year is surrendered to the cold. The thoughts and itineraries of the summer are the lackeys of the dark.

I fight hard against this demonic capitulation, but it is hard to enjoy an August day qua August day. The stronger the fight, the greater the acknowledgment of

Some people—grim arrivistes in the kingdom of the mind—talk about training your memory, making it fit and agile like an athlete.

Well, we all know what happens to athletes. Those hideously honed oarsmen all conk out in middle age, footballers develop hinge-creaking arthritis. Muscle tears set solid, discs weld together. Look at a reunion of old spor