“He stood and nodded at the great whitening sky. “We’re sure small, wouldn’t you say? Takes the onus off, somehow.”

“Be careful whom you choose to hate.The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly.Beware those who reside beneath the shadow of the Wings.”

“You can’t explain grace, anyway, especially when it arrives almost despite yourself. I didn’t even ask for it, yet somehow it breached and began to work.”

“Before reaching Grassy Butte, though, Dad spied a farmhouse with two pumps in the drive and a red-and-white sign out front saying DALE'S OIL COMPANY. Another sign said CLOSED, but a light was on in the house and Dad pulled in, saying, "I believe we might prevail on Dale. What do you think?""Prevail on Dale," I repeated to Swede."To make a sale," she added."And if we fail, we'll whale on Dale--""Till he needs braille!""Will you guys desist?" Dad asked.”

“And now, from beneath the audible, came a low reverberation. It came up through the soles of my feet. I stood still while it hummed upward bone by bone. There is no adequate simile. The pulse of the country worked through my body until I recognized it as music. As language. And the language ran everywhere inside me, like blood; and for feeling, it was as if through time I had been made of earth or mud or other insensate matter. Like a rhyme learned in antiquity a verse blazed to mind: O be quick, my soul, to answer Him; be jubilant, my feet! And sure enough my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation, as the land and the trees and the beasts of the orchard had done some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as of voices lifted at great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words came clear, and I sang with them a beautiful and curious chant.”

“Say what you like about melodrama, it beats confusion. The truth is we ought have a chance to say a little something when it’s getting dark. We ought to have a closing scene.”

“Is there a single person on whom I can press belief?No sir.All I can do is say, Here's how it went. Here's what I saw.I've been there and am going back.Make of it what you will.”