“This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds. ...your spirits don't rise until you get way down. Maybe it's because this - the mud, the bottom - is where it all rises from. ...when someone enters that valley with you, that mud, it somehow saves you again.”

“...and then I remembered this basic religious principle that God isn't there to take away our suffering or our pain but to fill it with his or her presence...”

“But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.”

“When everyone you loved in your life is gone, you have days when the wind comes into your house like a person. You get so alone the wind sits down at your table and tries to have itself a cup of coffee, but it can't, there's no time, it has to move on, it's the wind. I'm not saying the wind is a ghost, only that the feeling is of the wind, the whole notion of the wind, is different when all people you ever loved are gone. It's not fresh air blowing through your hair and airing out your sheets and kitchen. No, sir. It's company. The wind is company that has to go”

“You sleep with a dream of summer weather,wake to the thrum of rain—roped down by rain.Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass and rainy air. The plastic table on the terracehas shed three legs on its way to the garden fence. The mountains have had the sense to disappear. It's the Celtic temperament—wind, then torrents, then remorse.Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,docks in a pool of shadow all its own.That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on.”

“It is unearned love--the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It's the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.”

“Now. Maybe you think it is arrogant or self centered, or ridiculous for me to believe that God bothered to wiggle a cheap bolt out of my new used car because he or she needed to keep me away for a few days until just the moment when my old friend most needed me to help her mother move into whatever comes next. Maybe nothing conscious helped to stall me so that I would be there when I could be most useful. Or maybe it did. I’ll never know for sure. And anyway, it doesn’t really matter.”