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

I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.

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

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

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

My god has always been a laissez-faire deity, giving you the initial goods and sending you on to make your way.

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.