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“It was in the summer that one really lived. Then all the little overcrowded houses were opened wide, and the wind blew through them with sweet, earthy smells of garden-planting. The town looked as if it had just been washed. People were out painting their fences. The cottonwood trees were a-flicker with sticky, yellow little leaves, and the feathery tamarisks were in pink bud. With the warm weather came freedom for everybody. People were dug up, as it were. The very old people, whom one had not seen all winter, came out and sunned themselves in the yard. The double windows were taken off the houses, the tormenting flannels in which children had been encased all winter were put away in boxes, and the youngsters felt a pleasure in the cool cotton things next their skin.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“We listen to NPR for the first two hours on the road, the strange comfort of bad news reported in reasonable tones,”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays