That’s one thing I learned from Ray Senior. You don’t owe an explanation to anybody but the Lord, and most people will stop asking if you act like you won’t be telling.

What are the words to say to someone who gave you back your life, who believed that you still had a soul, who acknowledged how bad it was to feel? Shouldn’t there be another language for this? Different words altogether?

We say ‘Thank you very much’ and ‘I so appreciate what you have done’ to people who fill our grocery bags, to people who offer us a ride across town. What are the words to say to someone who gave you back your life, who believed that you still had a soul, who acknowledged how bad it was possible to feel? Shouldn’t there be another language for this? Different words altogether? And if I use the same old words, did I change what I was trying to say? Did I make it a same old thing?

...then is that not life in its simplest form? That so little matters so much, and so much matters so little.

Mrs. Monaghan says we don’t always have to say what we like and what we don’t like. We should just practice dealing with it.

The sky is a living thing when one is a desert dweller, stretched out, vast and imposing, with its constant dance of cloud and color, the visual equivalent of a movie soundtrack to one’s life.

But failing isn’t proof that nothing matters or that we were fools to care. We fail even though things matter very much; it’s the possibility of failure that makes them matter even more.

. . . in the length of time measured by infinity, and in the size of a world measured by countless universes, is it possible to believe that our lives are anything more than a few blades of grass?

. . . it feels like I’ve been thrown down a chute. I’m careening forward, trying not to get too banged up, utterly out of control of my descent, and somewhere in the dark, there’s a hole waiting for me to fall through it.

Sometimes it’s not that you don’t want help. It’s that you can’t bear to be offered help that just keeps turning out not to be enough after all.