Love Enduring Rejection

"Having children teaches you, I think, that love can survive your being despised in every aspect of yourself. That you need not collapse when the shriek comes: Don't you get it? I hate you! But you do need to get it. You do need to understand and accept being hated. I think this is one of the greatest gifts children can give you, as long as it doesn't last."

Sue Miller, in While I Was Gone, p. 232

Odious Integrity

"What I was beginning to understand was that simply to act was to affirm my inescapable self, to make exactly the kind of mistake I would make. It seemed that for the moment...I was all of a piece, full of a kind of odious integrity"

Sue Miller in While I Was Gone p. 232

Loving, Painful Memory

"But pain may be a gift to us. ... Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift"

Sue Miller in While I Was Gone p. 109

Happiness Enough

"We were married six weeks later, and I would say we have lived happily, if not ever after, at least enough of the time since. There are always compromises, of course, but they are at the heart of what it means to be married. They are, occasionally, everything"

Sue Miller in While I Was Gone p. 95

Love's Presumption to Eternity

"Why does love feel it is - know for certain it is - eternal and absolute, every time? He opened a notebook and found a passage he had copied from Kafka's letters to Felice. 'I have no crazier and greater wish than that we should be bound together inseparably by the wrists.' Of course Kafka wrote letters to Felice only when they were apart. Love letters do not so much document daily love's long hours as precede them."

Annie Dillard in The Maytrees p. 128

Virtue: Found and Left Untried

"What gave adults the cheer to tolerate their hypocrisy? Even his mother praised generosity and hoarded; she preached industry and barely worked. Perhaps every generation passes to the next, to hand down to yet more children, an untouched trunk of virtues. The adults describe the trunk's contents to the young and never open it."

Annie Dillard in The Maytrees p. 96

Intellectual Desperation

"Every book he read was a turn he took. He ran aground. He started new notebooks without having made the least sense of any old notebook. He pitched into the world for plunder, probed it with torches, filled his arms and brain with its pieces botched - to what end? Every fact was a rune. Whole unfilled systems littered the kitchen and beach of the house he shared with Lou. He wanted to spend himself broke in the brain, to master something and start again. Since everything fit with everything else, how could anyone begin to think or understand?"

Annie Dillard in The Maytrees p. 34

Love's Shocking Uniqueness

"After they married she learned to feel their skin as double-sided. They felt a pause. Theirs was too much feeling to push through the crack that led down to the dim world of time and stuff. That world was gone. They held themselves alert only in those few million cells where they touched. She learned from those cells his awareness and his courtesy. Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again."

Annie Dillard in The Maytrees p. 31

Future Projections

"The old thrift that once kept us alive has been replaced by extravagance and waste. People are living as if they think they are in a movie. They are all looking in one direction, toward 'a better place,' and what they see is no thicker than a screen."

Wendell Berry in Hannah Coulter p. 178

A Silent Hope

"Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustn't shirk it. Love, after all, "hopeth all things." But maybe you must learn, and it is hard learning, not to hope out loud, especially for other people. You must not let your hope turn into expectation."

Wendell Berry in Hannah Coulter p. 146

Bickering In Love

"We quarreled because we loved each other, I have no doubt of that. We were trying to become somehow the same person, one flesh, and we often failed. When distance came between us, we would blame it on each other. And here is a wonder. I maybe never loved him so much or yearned toward him so much as when I was mad at him. It's not a simple thing, this love."

Wendell Berry in Hannah Coulter p. 109