Who was the greatest business man ever. . . The greatest salesman? Advertiser? Who? . . . It was Jesus. . . Jesus was the founder of modern business. . . he picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world!

I was just delighted to be a legitimate, for-real published author.

I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.

He smelled cold water and cold intrepid green. Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the smell of cold, raw green.

When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart.

What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other.

I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possibly meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant—step back into her own bare feet, onto the wet grass or fallen leaves or snowy ground of the living Enon, so that we could share just one last human word.