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People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

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People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a dist...more

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There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.

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What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.

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Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that hap...more

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The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows

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The tunnel of winter had settled over our lives, ushered in by that great official Hoodwink, the end of daylight saving time. Personally I would vote ...more

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Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She...more

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In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing...more

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I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs ...more

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But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperatel...more

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It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then ...more

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While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between t...more

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Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.