“Only later-looking back through the years-do we come to realise those ordinary choices are often the critical turning point in our destiny.”

“Ordinary people can be heroes too,' he said, 'if they want to be.”

“There is yet time for all that is to come.”

“How easy it is to be bitter or angry; that's when you're at your weakest! But when you choose to be kind, to forget your hurt, that's when you find within the greatest strength of all.”

“The attics of the mind hold onto their dusty secrets and free them at inappropriate moments.”

“Today's news is tomorrow's history.”

“Word from the outside, whether it arrived in a mail sack or a news report, seldom overshadowed the facts of our lives. We talked in facts -- work and weather, the logistics of this fence, that field -- but stories were how we spoke. A good story rose to the surface of a conversation like heavy cream, a thing to be savored and served artfully. Stored in dry wit, wrapped in dark humor, tied together with strings of anecdote, these stories told the chronology of a family, the history of a piece of land, the hardships of a certain year or a span of years, a series of events that led without pause to the present. If the stories were recent, they filtered through the door to my room late at night, voices hushed around the kitchen table as they sorted out this day and held it against others, their laughter sharp and sad and slow to come. Time was the key. Remember the time...and something in the air caught like a whisper. Back when. Back before a summer too fresh and real to talk about, a year's work stripped in a twenty-minute hailstorm; a man's right hand mangled in the belts of a combine, first day of harvest; an only son buried alive in a grain bin, suffocated in a red avalanche of wheat.”