Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.

You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.

I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.

Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.

Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied

The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.

My heart is heavy, she thought. It’s not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.

life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget... So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.

On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.

I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.

Church always seemed the same. Jess could tune it out the same way he tuned out school, with his body standing up and sitting down in unison with the rest of the congregation but his mind numb and floating, not really thinking or dreaming but at least free.

Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.

It's crazy isn't it?" She shook her head. "You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful." She shook her head again. "It's crazy.

She wasn't scared of going deep, deep down in a world of no air and little light

The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.

You're the proverbial diamond in the rough", she'd said to him once, touching his nose lightly with the tip of her electrifying finger.

...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)

...I just gave up trying to be a Christian... Let's face it, I ain't got the knack for holiness. Besides, I didn't have the slightest little desire to join the likes of Reverend Pelham at the dinner table for fourteen minutes, much less at the banquet table of Heaven eternally. Eternity is a mighty long time to be stuck with people who judge every word you say and think and condemn most of what you do. It struck me as pretty miserable company. And if Reverend Pelham was the kind of company God preferred to keep, well, I just hoped they'd be happy together.

Fear is one thing. To let fear grab you and swing you around by the tail is another.

Hope ... is not a feeling it is something you do.

The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.

The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.