Telling a story is like reaching into granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told. —29
I hungered and thirsted to hear somebody talk about books who knew more about them than I did. I didn't mean I wanted to be a schoolteacher. I just made that my pretense to be there, for I had never heard that anybody ever went to a university just to read books. —69
I can see how we grow up like crops of wheat and are harvested and carried away. —129
I knew that I had come to [the graveyard] out of kindness, theirs and mine. The grief that came to me then was nothing like the grief I had felt for myself alone, at the end of my stay in Lexington. This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way it added to me what I had lost. I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come. —132
Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. —133
One of the best days of the year, for me, was Decoration Day, when people would come from near and far with flowers to decorate the graves. Besides being beautiful and fragrant with all the roses and peonies and boughs of mock orange, it was a kind of grace and benediction, and a kind of homecoming. —159
They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works — although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself. What they didn't see was that it was beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest. —160
In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings. ... And so there we all were on a little wave of time lifting up to eternity, and none of us ever in time would know what to make of it. How could we? —205
I built a johnboat. One afternoon we slid it down the hillside and down the bank and onto the water. It floated light as a leaf in the dappled shadows. That moment was a height of joy that I have never altogether come down from. —309
Here on the river I have known peace and beauty such as I never knew in any other place. —327
This resting involves traveling at great speed, first on the road and then on the river. The people are in an emergency to relax. They long for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. —331
To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense. —335
