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

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

I feel like I don't have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.

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

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.

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