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 is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.

She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.

Is it love that connects us, is that what it is? I never knew that the feeling I have is regular old love because it's so-intricate. Perhaps there is another name for it, one we don't yet know. I used to think that love was simple and noticeable, like rain falling, so that just as you'd look at your skin and say Water, you would also wake in the morning and say Love. But it has been underneath, this new and old thing I feel, subterranean, silent and steady, like blood, rushing along and along without often making itself known.

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.

It is a rule of nature that taking a day off on the farm sets a person back at least a week.

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