“For much of my life I was not acquainted with what may seem the obscure derivation of the adjective 'sincere.' It is from two Latin words, sine, without, and cera, wax. What a rare thing it is to be treated without wax. My desire is always to conduct relationships based upon honest regard. As I sipped the last drops of beef tea I tried to enumerate moments stripped of pretense and all I could come up with was those efforts of mine, with brother-in-law, when he grasped my hand in desperate gratitude, unknowing, and allowed me to really see him. As I relived those moments of extremity, a strange thought met me unawares. Were I not to know him, or someone, some person, at this radical depth, I fear my time on earth would be hideous. I was surprised to think this. But it crossed my mind that to know others on a superficial level only is a desperate hell and life is worth living only if the veneer is stripped away, the polish, the wax, and we see the true grain of the other no matter how far less than perfect, even ugly, even savage at the heart.”

“My mother is Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and she lived on her home reservation. My father taught there. He had just been discharged from the Air Force. He went to school on the GI Bill and got his teaching credentials. He is adventurous - he worked his way through Alaska at age seventeen and paid for his living expenses by winning at the poker table.”

“I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.”

“Here I am where I ought to be.”

“It was enough just to sit there without words.”

“I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise grew discouraged and traveled on.”

“I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.”

“They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were they all fused into a single stubbornness.”

“some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.”

“I look down at my black Diablo, head on his paws. He is at my feet. He knows that he must trust to my forgiveness for his daily meat. So he wags his plumed tail and noses at my foot and I pat him gently. Affection, I tell him, is how a dog survives. Knowing how to exist without it is how a woman wrests her life into her own hands. But then it comes, it takes one by surprise. Affection and freedom and the will to risk. Everything that happened since I answered the door to Fleur was leading up to this.”

“I tried to get away from him, to get to that door, but instead I backed up against the wall and was stuck there in that white, white room.”