Our mission in life is not to discover our fate as we go along, or even to procreate, but rather to fill up the endless gray void that is time.

It's all a big old chain. There isn't one unconnected link.

In the end maybe what marriage offered was the determination of one's burial site.

It was about forgiving. I understood that forgiveness itself was strong, durable—like strands of a web weaving around us, holding us.

Life on earth, filled with uncertainty and change, seemed far more difficult than what lay beyond the grave.

We're only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you're born, sometimes grows if you aren't in lucky surroundings. It's our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud. It's our task to seek out something with truth for us, no matter if there is a hundred-mile obstacle course in the way, or a ramshackle old farmhouse that binds and binds.

We all need people to tell us that we were the ones who had been deeply wronged.