“Do you believe in an afterlife?" the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate.Brown nodded. "I think this is it.”

“Do you believe in Jesus?Jesse looks at me so brown-eyed it hurts.He nods."I do," he says.I sit up."I think you look like him.”

“Sometimes I think if I had to choose between an ear of corn or making love to a woman, I'd choose the corn.”

“Then she says, ‘I love you.’ Like three drops of blood falling onto snow.”

“Who am I, that you should love me?""You are My Queen," said Eugenides. She sat perfectly still, looking at him without moving as his words dropped like water into dry earth."Do you believe me?" he asked. "Yes," she answered. "Do you love me?""Yes.""I love you."And she believed him.”

“Can you keep a secret, Sarah?" she asked. I nodded, remembering all our secrets shared together in her mother's house, and she said, her breath hot in my ear, "You cannot harvest the corn until you go into the corn."I awoke with tears on my face, my hands clutching at the ribs around my heart. I had for more than forty years kept the past behind an impenetrable wall of my own devising. I thought that to move beyond this wall and revisit the past would scorch my reason and make me mad. But then, as I lay sweating in bed, restless and prickly, it came to me that to harvest a field of corn one does not wade into the dark middle of things and cut the stalks from the inside out. It is best done starting with the outside ears and working inward, stalk by stalk, keeping the light of the sun always at one's back so that its rays can illuminate each ear of corn, be it whole and sweet or black and blighted. And in this way does one make a meal that feeds a starving body back to wholeness. (183)”