“You make cheese yourself," she repeated reverently. "You are a real housewife." It has taken me decades to get here, but I took that as a compliment.”

“Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.”

“But Anatole said suddenly, 'Don't expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I'm warning you. When things go bad, you will blame yourself.' 'What are you telling me?''I am telling you what I'm telling you. Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.”

“So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.' Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so.I thought I might finally have offended Loyd past the point of no return, like stealing the lobster from frozen foods that time, to get myself fired. But Loyd was just thinking. After a minute he said, 'No, it's not like that. It's not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to cause them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.'In balance.'Really, it's like the spirits have made a deal with us.'And what is the deal?' I asked.We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests.'Like a note you'd send somebody after you stayed in their house?'Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one.”

“Look, if I don't flirt with you, you should take that as a compliment. I don't always respect myself, but I almost never respect men. They're like flowers all showy, a lot of color and lust. You pick them and throw them on the ground. But you I respect. I always did. From the first day I saw you.”

“Do not expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I'm warning you. When things go badly, you will blame yourself.”

“A blank space on a form, the missing page, a void, a hole in your knowledge of someone--it's still some real thing. It exists. You don't get to fill it in with whatever you want.”