“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is.”

“Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.”

“I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.You want a letter from me? she asked.I told her yes.Oh, God bless you, she said.The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me.”

“It's been five weeks since she walked out of my door. I started counting the second the door closed. I wonder when I'll stop.”

“I walked a mile with Pleasure;She chatted all the way;But left me none the wiserFor all she had to say.I walked a mile with Sorrow;And ne’er a word said she;But, oh! The things I learned from her,When Sorrow walked with me.”

“Somehow she lost her compass. Her engine failed. Her gyroscope broke. She's ... lost. She says the road she was on isn't there any more and she doesn't know where to walk now.”