Cynicism induces a state of helplessness…It disables resistance to all these ills and reduces those who can see and name them into passive collaborat… - Marilynne Robinson

I love loneliness. I consider my history with loneliness to be among my great blessings…I hasten to add that it is definitely not for everyone. It should be approached with caution.

I meant to leave you a reasonably candid testament to my better self, and it seems to me now that what you must see here is just an old man struggling with the difficulty of understanding what it is he's struggling with.

This document explained my aunt Molly’s departure to my whole satisfaction. Even now I always imagine her leaning from the low side of some small boat, dropping her net through the spumy billows of the upper air. Her net would sweep the turning world unremarked as a wind in the grass, and when she began to pull it in, perhaps in a pell-mell ascension of formal gentlemen and thin pigs and old women and odd socks that would astonish this lower world, she would gather the net, so easily, until the very burden itself lay all in a heap just under the surface. One last pull of measureless power and ease would spill her catch into the boat, gasping and amazed, gleaming rainbows in the rarer light.