“Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustnt shirk it. Love, after all, 'hopeth all t...”

“Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because th...”

“I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When...”

“Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thought and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, ...”

“In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It w...”

“I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And ...”

“Rosy waited as long as she dared then sat forward and let her eye rove Frannys lounge, up and down the shelves, looking for something, not even sure she could bring herself to act if she saw it aga...”

“Over the water of time I call to youIn a language I do not know.”

“At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general.”

“A word mother, means a world to me.”

“Maa" The only word that holds power to give you strength when you are in pain.”

“STAINSWith red clay between my toes,and the sun setting over my head,the ghost of my mother blows in,riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord,riding on a honeysuckle breeze.Her teeth, the keys of a ...”