...you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder, you have to shout it out you have to shout for help... And then finally, the way through grief is grieving.

My god has always been a laissez-faire deity, giving you the initial goods and sending you on to make your way.

She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.

It is books that are a key to the wide world if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.

It was about forgiving. I understood that forgiveness itself was strong, durable—like strands of a web weaving around us, holding us.

This was life, I supposed, running and running and running, and realizing along the way that the phantom was getting closer.

It was impossible not to admire him, not to want to do something to contain that kind of beauty- drink him, ingest him, sneak into his shirt and hide for the rest of one's natural life.

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

I had forgotten what it was like, to be drawn to a person...I'd forgotten how your blood flows toward a person when they move, so that all at once you know what the pull of gravity feels like. and you know that this is something strong and important, something that you need for life, this woman moving through the room.

It is a rule of nature that taking a day off on the farm sets a person back at least a week.