Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the shortening days laid down their lives for our welfare and onward resolve. There's the miracle for you, the absolute sacrifice that still holds back seed: a germ of promise to do the whole thing again, another time. . . Thanksgiving is Creation's birthday party. Praise harvest, a pause and sigh on the breath of immortality.

Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don't; but we wear it all the same

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

To think is not always to see.

It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

Once the rains abated, my father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.