I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.

We write to make sense of it all.

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.