Visiting Tom Quotes

“Sleeping in the same bed with someone to whom you can admit your failings is a lasting comfort indeed. This is not about "mea culpa" as surrender, it is about "mea culpa" as mortar in binding together the uneven bricks of a human foundation.”
― Michael Perry, Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace

“Inevitably, our children come to see us as we are. Not as we wish we were, or even as we should be.”
― Michael Perry, Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace

“... Tom got to rattling off the pranks he and his school boy buddies pulled ... and what I saw wasn't an old man gone wistful but rather an old man still resonating to the glee of a young heart.”
― Michael Perry, Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace

“I stand beside Tom's barn and ponder the benign heedlessness of the people in the speeding cars, and here I am in the speeding car. In my heart I wish the bypass had never been built; in my car I never take the old way.”
― Michael Perry, Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace

“He guides the photographers to his sawmill now, cutting between the backside of the shed that stores the cannon and the woven wire fence establishing the boundary of the interstate right-of-way. Across the highway, a white cross is visible. It is fourteen feet tall and stands on Tom’s property, just outside the state fence line. He points it out for the photographers. Yah, n’that cross over there, there was a woman state trooper killed over there. They wanted to put a memorial up for her but the state wouldn’t allow a crucifix on public land. So they come to me, asked me if they could put it on my land. I said sure, on one condition: You make it big as you can.”
― Michael Perry, Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace – A Poignant Memoir of Wisdom and Spirit in Rural Wisconsin