“I knew better than to expect a visible difference in an hour, but I looked anyhow.” (garden)

“I began to live in my losses.”

“And I saw how all-of-a-piece it was, how never-ending—always coming, always there, always going.”

“This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way it added to me what I had lost. … The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.”

“We couldn’t quite see at the time, or didn’t want to know, that it was the demanding circumstances that had kept us together.”

“Ease of going was translated without pause into a principled unwillingness to stop.”

“The best equipment he’s got is his wife.”

“I felt a strange new respect for the heads I barbered. I knew that the dead carried with them out of this world things they could not give away.”

“What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection.”

“When it rose into your heart and throat, you felt joy and sorrow at the same time, and the joining of times and lives. To come into the presence of the place was to know life and death, and to be near in all your thoughts to laughter and to tears. This would come over you and then pass away, as fragile as a moment of light.”

“I try not to let good things go by unnoticed.”

“To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain. It is a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that you are human and therefore joined by kind to all that hates the world and hurries its passing—the violence and greed and falsehood that overcome the world that is meant to be overcome by love.”

“The Economy does not take people’s freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom.”