“Home"It would take forever to get therebut I would know it anywhere:My white horse grazing in my blossomy field.Its soft nostrils. The petalsfalling from the trees into the stream.The festival would be about to beginin the dusky village in the distance. The doefrozen at the edge of the grove:She leaps. She vanishes. My face—She has taken it. And my name—(Although the plaintive lark in the tallgrass continues to say and to say it.)Yes. This is the place.Where my shining treasure has been waiting.Where my shadow washes itself in my fountain.A few graves among the roses. Some mosson those. An ancientbell in a steeple down the roadmaking no sound at allas the monk pulls and pulls on the rope.”

“If you were M. Pujol, Madeleine says, I would reach out my hand to you. Like this.If you were M. Pujol, Adrien says, I would press my mouth against your pulse. Like this. If you were he, she says, I would cup your chin in my fingers.If you were he, he says, I would take those fingers into my mouth.Then my mouth would envy my fingers, she says.Then your mouth must usurp your fingers, he says.And then, she says, I would do this.”

“On my way home from the junior high, I would sometimes stop at the edge of our property and watch my mother ride the ride-on mower, looping in and out among the pine trees, and I could remember then how she used to whistle in the mornings as she made her tea and how my father, rushing home on Thursdays, would bring her marigolds and her face would light up in yellowy in delight. They had been deeply, separately, wholly in love- apart from her children my mother could reclaim this love, but with them she began to drift. It was my father who grew toward us as the years went by; it was my mother who grew away. ~pg 153; love”

“His eyes search the crowd until they find my face. My heartbeat lives in my throat; lives in my cheeks."I still don't understand," he says softly, "how she knew that it would work.”

“I would rather never make a penny on book sales and know that many had derived some fair pleasure from my writing, than to know that very few had ever taken a chance on my work. I certainly won't last forever, but I'd love to think that my imagination will continue to surface in the minds of others.”

“The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.”