If America taught me anything, it's that quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts' lemonade jar.

Every woman needed a husband, even if he did silence the song in her.

hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon.

I don't know whom or what he was defying. [...] [M]aybe the God he had never believed in.

Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.

You say their stories, it is gift they give you.

I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.