It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.

The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.

...if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.

That is how life goes--we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's.

Any father…must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents’ love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness.

There are several sources for my appreciation of pastors and the way they are described in this book. One of them is reading history and realizing that they had a profound creative impact on the Middle West and the settlement of the Middle West.

When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.