he'd once believed that the answer lay somehow in the music he created, he suspected now that He'd been mistaken. The more he thought about it, the more he'd come to realize that for him, music had always been a movement away from reality rather than a means of living in it more deeply. .. he now knew that burying himself in music had less to do with God than a selfish desire to escape.

He was the kind of man everyone would fall in love with, even if they didn't want to.

because the past was always around her and might return at any time. It prowled the world searching for her, and she knew it was growing angrier at every passing day.

You've gotten so caught up in being alone that you're afraid of what might happen if you actually find someone else that can take you away from it.

I got the sense that he was the kind of person who couldn't hold anger for more than a few minutes, because it just wasn't in him. It could never grow into resentment or bitterness, and I knew then that he was the kind of man who would be married forever. And I decided then and there that I should be the one to marry him.

God is out there watching you, even when you're away from home and that if you put your trust in God, you'll be all right in the end.

Who did she know in Raleigh who took the time off to fix a house? Or read Whitman or Eliot, finding images in the mind, thoughts of the spirit? Or hunted dawn from the bow of a canoe? These weren't the things that drove society, but she felt they shouldn't be treated as unimportant. They made living worthwhile.