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It might make me miss him more clearly.

"Youth is free from worry," I said sarcastically. "You've been listenin' to too many adults."

Lone Cowboy by Will James

As the twentieth century moved on, finding a nation in motion, America's obsession with ice was in many ways related to its obsession with cars, with the open road, and with the very idea of convenience.

He begged the party dress to marry him, saying all the things it expected to hear, all the things that went with strawberry sodas and farms in Connecticut.

Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers.

He knew that she believed he did not want to get well, yet he followed her instructions because he realized that his present sickness was unimportant. It was merely a trick by his body to relieve one more profound.

Numbers, he explained, constitute the only universal language.

"Disappearances are most probable in front of an audience."

(Translator's note: There is no medicine for Agata in the colony, other than either and the veterinarian spray, belladonna, used to knock out cows and horses--the same spray used on the girls and women of Molotschna.)

But not biblically speaking, says Mejal.
We can't read, says Salome, so how are we to know
what is in the Bible?
You are being difficult, says Mejal. We have been told
what is in the Bible.
Yes, says Salome, by Peters and the elders and by our
husbands.
Right, says Mejal. And by our sons.

Yes, says Mejal. But I have one further question I'd
like to raise. It has to do with the Biblical exhortation that women obey and submit to their husbands. How, if we are to remain good wives, she says, can we leave our men? Is it not disobedient to do so?
Our first and more pressing duty, says Salome, is to
our children, to their safety.
But not biblically speaking, says Mejal.

Yes, says Mejal. But I have one further question I'd
like to raise. It has to do with the Biblical exhortation that women obey and submit to their husbands. How, if we are to remain good wives, she says, can we leave our men? Is it not disobedient to do so?
Our first and more pressing duty, says Salome, is to
our children, to their safety.
But not biblically speaking, says Mejal.

Unless heaven is part of a dream, says Ona. Or unless dreams are illogical.
Well, that they are, says Agata.
I don't know, says On a, perhaps they are the most logical experience we can ever have.

Ona is a ghost to him, or less, because of her Narfa, her spinsterdom, and her burgeoning belly.

"Nothing is so firmly believed as that which a man knoweth least "

vote on our excommunications, to speak at the burials of our own babies while we remain silent, to interpret the Bible for us, to lead us in worship, to punish us! We are not members, Mariche, we are commodities

The entire colony of Molotschna is built on the foundation of patriarchy[...]where the women live out their days as mute, submissive and obedient servants. Animals. Fourteen-year-old boys are expected to give us orders, to determine our dates, to

In Molotschna luck does not exist. It is a sin to believe in luck. It is shameful to cry. All is God's will, nothing is left to chance in God's creation.

In the painting, Eve is beseeching God, begging, imploring . . . perhaps reasoning, as though she has it within her power to restore Christianity to its original grandeur. She's working behind the back of Adam, who is sleeping on the ground, as if to suggest that she knows he'd disapprove.

kill and she will dance on graves and burn forever in hell before she allows another man to satisfy his violent urges with the body of her three-year-old child.

She will destroy any living thing that harms her child, she will tear it from limb to limb, she will desecrate its body and she will bury it alive. She will challenge God on the spot to strike her dead if she has sinned by protecting her child from evil, and furthermore by destroying the evil that it may not harm another. She will lie, she will hunt, she will kill and she will dance on graves and burn forever p94

"The only thing I'm aware of having decided is that the women are not animals. And even that conclusion was arrived at without solid consensus amongst the women." P92

"Not a conscious fear of do-it-yourself mapmaking, she explains, but of what it implies: that we are masters of our own destiny." P86

"I remember how my father, two days before he disappeared, told me that the twin pillars that guard the entrance to the shrine of religion are storytelling and cruelty." P85

"In her lexicon, a smuggler is preferable to a teacher, though not as esteemed as a farmer." p84