“The things we felt most are hardest to put into words. Hate is always easier to speak of than love. How shall I make love go through the sieve of words and come out something besides a pulp?”

“Lord make me satisfied with small things. Make me content to live on the outside of life. God make me love the rind!”

“There must be some reason, I thought, why we should go on year after year, with this lump of debt, scrailing earth down to stone, giving so much and with no return. There must be some reason why I was made quiet and homely and slow, and then given this stone of love to mumble.”

“I always hated it when TV reporters stuck a microphone in the faces of people who'd just lost a home or a loved one, wanting to know how they felt. They felt like shit. They hurt, and they didn't know how they were going to get through the night. They wanted to scream and cry and hit the guy with the microphone.”

“... love and fear increase together with a precision almost mathematical: the greater the love is then the greater the fear is.”

“I like to pretend that the years alter and revalue, but begin to see that time does nothing but enlarge without mutation. You have a chance here--more than a chance, it is thrust upon you--to be alone and still. To look backward and forward and see with clarity. To see the years behind, the essential loneliness, and the likeness of one year to the next. The awful order of cause and effect. Root leading to stem and inevitable growth, and the same sap moving through tissue of different years, marked like the branches with inescapable scars of growth.”

“The things we truly love stay with us always, locked in our hearts as long as life remains.”