“from HOUSEKEEPING, by Marilynne Robinson: There is remembrance, and communion, altogether human and unhallowed. For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings. Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs, and every song recalls a thousand sorrows, and so they are infinite in number and all the same.”

“Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.”

“Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.”

“The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart”

“Well, there's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing. And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings. And there is always one last light to turn out and one last bell to ring. And the last one out of the circus has to lock up everything.”

“There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.”