“It was a wonderful life. To have a stage play right in this room, with real people acting real parts.”

“In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“While most people took family for granted, he [Father Tim] took it for grace.”

“Why can't life always be lived under the stars,' she said, 'with great music and family and friends?”

“... for fog was merely a cloud that wasn't too smitten with itself to visit terra firma.”

“That was his favorite thing about booksthey took you off to other peoples lives an places, but you could still set in your own chair by thoil heater, warm as a mouse in a churn.”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”