There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it. - Wendell Berry

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what's bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.

I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my very own forever, and my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.