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“College is closed,” Joe said. “College can’t protect you now.”
The farm is either the very paradise of Eden or a crushing burden of disappointment and despair manifested in fruit, depending on the day.
Fear and laughter: the two worst reactions in the absence of logic.
Disappointment, the children learn early on, is embodied by the mother.
It is sentimental and useless to tell someone you would gladly give them your past because the past is nontransferable,
I want to tell her she will never be hurt, that everything will be fair, and that I will always, always be there to protect her.
Isn’t that the way long marriages are? You can turn off the sound and still know the answer.
Over the course of his career, Duke played older, then for a stretch he played his age, then he played younger, all the while staying in the same exact place. I never knew how he pulled that off.
People with children are attuned to the inherent sexual possibility of an empty house.
There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the
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We clump together in our sorrow. In joy we may wander off in our separate directions, but in sorrow we prefer to hold hands.
“Every generation believes the world is going to end.”
The stories that are familiar will always be our favorites.
“Farming is depressing,” Joe said. “But once it gets in you, you can’t put it down.”
“Land gets sold when people die and the kids refuse to come home and take it over. Otherwise you keep the land.”
A child’s ability to misunderstand is limitless, even when she is no longer a child.
he was teaching you a lesson you’d be wise to learn: you can’t save them that won’t save themselves.”
I was desperate to be good, but all that did was make me look desperate.
maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.
The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.
The past need not be so all-encompassing that it renders us incapable of making egg salad.
The beauty and the suffering are equally true.
Good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs.
I was partial to fall because I liked the sharpness of the air and the brightness of the light on the leaves.
You think the thing that hurt you is going to hurt you forever but it doesn’t.”