“I would never believe that I was better off without the Drakes and they without me. Growing up, I’d seen them more often than my own grandparents. They were part of my landscape. And if that particular landscape suddenly included earthquakes and volcanoes and mudslides, then too bad; I already built a house there and dug the well and planted crops. It was an analogy my parents had to understand. They were homesteaders; they knew that once you found your home, you dug your roots. Period.”

“This is important to writing. . . that is, it is important to my own writing. This. . . is landscape! Mine. This dirt came from the prairie where I was a child. I played in it, dug in it, planted in it, and walked over it. It is where I began. And all my writing begins with a landscape such as this. A place.”

“You make me believe in happiness... if I had my way, if anything were up to me, I’d never be without you. You are my purpose.”

“For years it seemed to me that this period had become a recurrent nightmare that I had almost every night, because I would wake in the morning feeling the same terror I had felt in the room with the saint. During my adolescence, when I was a student at an icy boarding school in the Andes, I would wake up crying in the middle of the night. I needed old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Catasa was that they were always mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them, the deper they sank.”

“Do you think that I would not have let you know that, if you suffered, I was suffering too: that if you wept there were tears in my eyes also: and that if you lay in the house of bondage and were despised of men, I out of my griefs had built a house in which to dwell until your coming, a treasury in which all that man had denied to you would be laid up for your healing, one hundredfold in increase?”

“I find this to be true of my spiritual life, and maybe it applies to yours as well: I think about things more than I do them; I ponder what seems their goodness more than I perform them. As if my thought alone were enough. But a thought alone isn’t quite enough; it’s an impulse and not a commitment, a passing thing that doesn’t take root unless you plant it and make it grow.”