He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.

Yet I stake a claim, I am here, for I must be somewhere. But only as a child it seems, struggling to understand what every wife and gentleman passing on the street seems to know by rote. Whom to love, whom to castigate.

She understands all at once, with a small shock, exactly what it is she always needed to tell Harland: being there in person is not the same as watching. You might see things better on television, but you'll never know if you were alive or dead while you watched.

When the spirit passed through him he groaned, throwing body and soul into his weekly purge. The Amen enema, as I call it. My palindrome for the Reverend.

You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back.

People change, she said. Not everything stays with you all your life.

Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.

We must look at the lens through we see the world, as well as the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.

Each of us guard a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside.

People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.