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

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

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

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.

This was life, I supposed, running and running and running, and realizing along the way that the phantom was getting closer.

From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.

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