You fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation.

I will do what I promised, he whispered. No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone.

When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen.

There wasn't any virtue in it. The drinking or the quittin? Either one. There aint no virtue in quittin what you aint able any longer to do in the first place.

I know they was families got thowed off their farms back in the thirties by the TVA and come to Anderson County and got thowed off all over again. They was even families had been removed from their homesteads in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the thirties, TVA in the thirties again, and the atom bomb in the forties. By that time they didnt have nothin.

They was some of em wound up just livin in the woods like animals. And that was a cold winter, too. People would see em crossin the road at night in the carlights. Whole families. Carryin blankets. Pots and pans. People tried to find em. Take em some flour and meal. Coffee. Maybe a little sidemeat. I think about those children. I do yet.

Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.

Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him.

Let's not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember "Life is too short to be little.

Disappointments are like weeds in the garden. You can let them grow and take over your life, or you can rout them out and let the flowers sprout.

Things don't always go the way we want. I've come to realize that some things just aren't meant to be.

I sat in that room and realized that you can cut off a finger, cut off a hand, even cut off a leg, but if you take a woman's breast, you are cutting more than just a body part.