By 1899, we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat.
Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.
It’s amazing what you can see when you just sit quietly and look.
It was too bad, but sometimes a little knowledge could ruin your whole day, or at least take off some of the shine.
The strongest people in the world are the ones who think they’re weak.
I had never seen a real live dead person.
When two people love each other, they do not comply and does not dominate, only complement each other.
It means that we should celebrate today’s failure because it is a clear sign that our voyage of discovery is not yet over.
We had been so close to missing each other, he and I. He had turned out to be the greatest gift of all.
But my mother’s life was a never-ending round of maintenance. Not one single thing did she ever achieve but that it had to be done all over again, one day or one week or one season later. Oh, the monotony.
I don’t have that many days left,” he said as we sat together in the library. “Why would I want to spend them on matters of drainage and overdue accounts? I must husband my hours and spend every one of them wisely. I regret that I didn’t come to this realization until I reached fifty years of age. Calpurnia, you would do well to adopt such an attitude at an earlier age. Spend each of your allotted hours with care.
Packing and balancing them was an art and, every year, scores of men across the South were crushed and killed by unstable loads.
Granddaddy had told me about the wasp that could opt to be male or female while in a larval stage. An interesting thought. I wondered why human children weren’t given that option in their grub stage, say up through age five. With everything I had seen about the lives of boys and girls, I would definitely choose to be a boy grub.