When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light.