It is a frightful thing to drop out of one's place in the world and never find it again. I try very hard to keep my memory green and thus by sympathy live anew, or if not anew, aright, which is more t...
Lola's only nugget of wisdom to her little daughters was Never cry, never ever.
Musicians add to songs and they evolve: For as was true of human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to...
No looking back. Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past have nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will alway...
Verbs. All of them tiring.
One thing he discovered with a great deal of astonishment was that music held for him more then just pleasure. There was meat to it. The grouping of sounds, their forms in the air as they rang out and...
Our minds aren't made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way we do bliss. It's a gift God gives us, a sign of His care for us.
Ruby said there were many songs that you could not say anybody in particular had made by himself. A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so tha...
When time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.
So even very young she saw slavery as an ancient practice arising because rich people would rather not do hard work, and also from the tendency of people to clench hard to advantageous passages in the...
Survive long enough and you get to a far point in life where nothing else of particular interest is going to happen. After that, if you don’t watch out, you can spend all your time tallying your losse...
That's not a thing any of us are granted. To go back. Wipe away what later doesn't suit us and make it the way we wish it. You just go on
What they need is everything even and smooth. Not love or hate, pleasure or pain, hope or fear, safety or danger. Nobody kissing your cheek at bedtime till you tingle with pleasure in your stomach, an...
As was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained.
They agreed they neither gave two hoots now as to how marriages were normally conducted. They would do as they pleased and run their lives by the roll of the seasons. In autumn the apple trees would b...
To Ada, Ruby’s monologues seemed composed mainly of verbs, all of them tiring. Plow, plant, hoe, cut, can, feed, kill.
Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.
Going bearded seemed one less thing to have to fail at.
Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.
V drifts into talking about generations. How grandparents and grandchildren so often get along very well. Remove one generation—twenty-five years at least—and the anger in both directions dissipates....
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