After all the human noise and conflicts have stopped, the absent person has more room in your heart to spread out and be herself. My mother’s been gone ten years and I know her much better now than when we saw each other every day.

The human mind, as we know from personal experience, is a chronic time traveler, but we are repeatedly amazed by its ability to hitch up the body, the body that resides the only place it can – in present time – and pull it along like a wagon, with its entire load of sensory equipment, backward or forward into other time zones.

The walk north was exactly the right distance to make me walk out of myself... If you walked out of yourself going north, what did you do on the return walk? Enjoyed my emptiness. Or sometimes just congratulated myself for escaping.

As long as you can go on creating new roles for yourself, you are not vanquished.

But what we ought to fear is the kind of death that happens in life. It can happen at any time. You’re going along, and then, at some point, you congeal. You know, like jelly. You’re not fluid anymore. You solidify at a certain point and from then on your life is doomed to be a repetition of what you have done before.

When I was in seminary,” Father Edward had told other guests around the table when he was purchasing his books, “my spiritual director told me not to read theology. ‘Read novels,’ he said, and I have.

Then he laughed, his typical laugh. Making me wish i had ten more such anectodes stashed away to keep him standing there, holding onto me and laughing.

But the son whips out a Bayer aspirin, the father rises to his feet, embraces the son, and Technicolor is restored to their lives.

I read constantly. If I don’t have a good book, I’m beside myself.

I’m always aware that I risk being taken for a neurasthenic prima donna when I explain to someone who wants ‘just a little’ of my time that five minutes of the wrong kind of distraction can ruin a working day.