The Book of Ruth

I feel like I don't have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.

We're only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you're born, sometimes grows if you aren't in lucky surroundings. It's our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud. It's our task to seek out something with truth for us, no matter if there is a hundred-mile obstacle course in the way, or a ramshackle old farmhouse that binds and binds.

We all need people to tell us that we were the ones who had been deeply wronged.

Sometimes I couldn't figure it out, what all the living was for.

I heard the phrases and I wanted all of me to call out in a song, a song that doesn't have words, a song that almost doesn't have noise. A lot of people take a short cut and call that feeling of song love. They just call it that because there isn't a way to describe it. But the word love doesn't describe the half of it. It doesn't do anything to bring to mind the song we all want so desperately to sing.

It must be strange to keep your strong mind in a body that grows older and weaker and no longer resembles your own image of yourself.

In Charles Dickens's books I had to admire the way the meanest enemies spoke to each other, with what seemed to me to be the greatest civility.

I have given up on speech with the Rev; there is no use explaining that you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help. My trust, even down in that dark place I carry, is that some person will come running. And then finally the way through grief is grieving.

Miss Finch said she meant to listen to new books as well as her old favorites, even the ones that pierced her heart, before she departed this world.

I knew that we were two humans, that's all, two humans walking around blindly in the night, looking for a warm hand.

However, Mr. Darcy was the man I truly admired. I see him clearly. He is exceptionally tall, and his head is covered with black curly hair. He looks serious except when he smiles at you; it knocks you right straight across the room. His smile is that brilliant. He doesn't ever do anything to hurt girls. I longed for him to walk out of his book and reach for my hand.