“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 for one more hour of light on winter evenings instead of the sudden, extra-early blackout. Whose idea was it to jilt us this way, leaving us in cold November with our unsaved remnants of daylight petering out before the workday ends? In my childhood, as early as that, I remember observing the same despair every autumn: the feeling that sunshine, summertime, and probably life itself had passed me by before I'd even finished a halfway decent tree fort. But mine is not to question those who command the springing forward and the falling back. I only vow each winter to try harder to live like a potato, with its tacit understanding that time is time, no matter what any clock might say. I get through the hibernation months by hovering as close as possible to the woodstove without actual self-immolation, and catching up on my reading, cheered at regular intervals by the excess of holidays that collect in a festive logjam at the outflow end of our calendar.”

“Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?”

“Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers.”

“...when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.”

“Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.”

“Most of them don't know what communism is, could not pick it out of a lineup. They only know what anticommunism is. The two are practically unrelated.”

“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: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).”

“Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.”

“You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.”

“It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.”

“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”