People just showed up and were always made welcome. To stay less than an hour was an insult, and there was always a meal. - Shirley Abbott

All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction.

The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes—to me a beatitude—is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women—or men—can suffer is to be bereft of their past.

If I grew up in the simple-minded belief that women were as strong and intelligent as men, it was because I came from a society that had once believed it.