You can’t kill history. You can’t shoot it with a bullet and watch it recede into whatever lies outside of memory. History is tougher than that—if it’s going to die, it has to die on its own

Love is a strange fact - it hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. It makes no sense at all.

Fresh peach pie can lift a bullying reprobate into apologetic courtesy; I have watched it happen.

I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, the air gold and so clean it quivers.

My sister, Swede, who often sees to the nub, offered this: People fear miracles because they fear being changed--though ignoring them will change you also. Swede said another thing, too, and it rang in me like a bell: No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here's what I saw. Here's how it went. Make of it what you will.

We see a newborn moth unwrapping itself and announce, Look, children, a miracle! But let an irreversible wound be knit back to seamlessness? We won't even see it, though we look at it every day.

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature.