In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him. - Richard Ford

It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant — often it happened in the middle of the night — and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.

It's shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible.

How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below you. You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away and all is lost.