“The Lesson You've Gotto learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tearsshed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped.Everyone learns this. Born, everyonebreathes, pays tax, plants deadand hurts galore. There's grief enough for each. My motherlearned by moving man to man,outlived them all. The parched earth'sbare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it.Other than myself, of course.I've made a study of bearingand forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and notethose faces passing by: Not one's a god. ”

“The measure of a man comes down to moments, spread out like dots of pain on the canvas on life. Everything you were, everything you'll someday be, resides in the small, seemingly ordinary choices of everyday life.....Each decision seems as insignificant as a left turn on an unfamiliar road when you have no destination in mind. But the decisions accumulate until you realize one day that they've made you the man that you are.”

“Obedience is not a virtue. I wanted to please everyone but myself, and I had to lose everything to learn that lesson. For my pride I had to lie in a glass coffin for twenty years to learn my lesson. By the time I was released, I understood. My husband was a good man, but he did not rescue me. I rescued myself.”

“Someday all you will have to light your way will be a single ray of hope and that will be enough.”

“There is a funny joke that God plays on man. Have you laughed yet? I think it might be the funniest one of all. The joke is: everyone you ever knew, and anyone who might mourn your passing, will die. What happens after this? There is no proof that you existed. And there is no one to care whether you ever did in the first place. There is a song about this. Maybe someday I will sing it to you.”

“Move your dreams from someday to this day and you'll begfin to surely and steadily fulfill them.”