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Like all women, I had once been expert at negotiating the balance between the demands of courtesy and the demands of expectation. Expectation, which I knew to be a debt that would at some point have to be paid, in one form or another.

I didn't know, then, how a sorrow deferred does not dwindle away but deepens.

"The Feral Troubadour"
The most I can probably aspire to is to be counted among the people who care for the small, the ordinary, the overlooked creatures of the earth. Because I am one, and it appears that I am contented with a glance from a pretty woman and the poetry on a clean bathroom floor.

I just think ... there are now and there always were and there always will be such difficult times in life. So difficult. For me, the way to come to terms is not to look away.

The trust that evolved from that had weight -- an immovable thing, like the hills around us, full of stories they'll never tell and life they'll always nurture.

Their friendship revived and spread roots in the terrain of grief particular to martyrdom, where the anguish of loss mixes with pride, resolve, the desire for vengeance, and camaraderie.

He knew grief carved out a warren that could start to look more comfortable than the above ground world. The Jenkinses were one foot in the warren.

Therein, she thought, lies the unbearable solitude of a lie: you're alone when you tell it, alone when you love it, alone when you try to dismantle it.

Calling this new weapon "a harnessing of the basic power of the universe" was, he knew, horseshit. It was a harnessing of the hubris of men.

"portrait of the alcoholic frozen in a block of ice"
...
it's a long drive into manhood but such a short walk out I spent so long
shocking myself with my own carelessness

Cal Jenkins was born in the spring of 1920 with one leg shorter than the other. Just two inches shorter, but enough to make plenty of things difficult.

"What Seems Like Joy"
how much history is enough history
...
even a lobster climbs away from its shell a few times a life
but every time I open my eyes I find I am still inside myself
each epiphany dull and familiar
...
I just want to be shaken like a flag whipping away its dust

To read is to embrace both the light and darkness in my life, and the lives of others.

Because I'm lacking in many ways, I hope to fill myself with books.
...
Reading may seem useless, but it's what makes us stronger.

Novels don't tell us "how to live" but show us that "it's possible to live in a different way"
...
Something I love about novels is that despite knowing that I'll never get answers, I'm free to ask questions.

I've purchased five online carts in the days since Korgy left. ... they were never really the thing I wanted in the first place. They were just smaller, more attainable things to want. Placeholders for the bigger, insatiable, incorrigible want underneath.

"Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before"
...We all want

the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder,
like the first man to hear a parrot speak), but we live
on an enormous flatness floating between

two oceans. ...

You had to translate his actions, for they were seldom accompanied by words, because his world was a quiet world: a disconnected, fractured space, a puzzle that made him phone me at three o'clock in the morning, asking me for the last piece of the border so he could fill in the sky.

She had aged well; the process had been kind. And she had left nature alone, opting instead to banish vanity like the meddlesome, suffocating weed it was.

It feels always that I'm on the edge of some comprehension here but never breaking through to the other side.

The endlessness of the night sky here pours a wild brilliant vertigo into me.

This wasn't the world in which things matched, or even went with. This was a world devoid of harmony. This was a world of drama, where comedy and tragedy fought for space.

Filth's astonishment lifted his soul outside his body and he stood looking down not only at the slumped body but at his own, gazing and emptied of all meaning now.

Love requires courage, but it fortifies you at the same time. I don't know anything else in the world that yields the exact same treasure it demands.

The world wanted so much from me. Love required so much betrayal. Sometimes of myself. Oftentimes, everyone with a heart ended up devastated.

I had never met his mother but I could tell by the ease with which he was walking out of my life that she treasured him. People who are loved well always think there is more out there for them to enjoy.

When your mama is in heaven there is nothing to stop her from loving you - not a man, not a job, not whatever she wanted to be doing but she had kids instead. When the sun shines, you can feel that pure love on you. It tastes like sugarcane.

Everybody should consult with the Lord from time to time ... But when I wanted the Word, I looked to Granny's weathered pages that had been turned by generations of fingers. ... The paper, thin as butterfly wings, was heavy with wisdom. The salesman's Bible was like Seventeen magazine. Cute as can be, but empty as a hole in the ground.

If you have ever experienced motherlove, you can never forget the fragrance of it.

A strict division between human and machine culpability is quickly becoming untenable, creating a landscape where ethical norms strain under unfamiliar weights.