"If you're a grown man when you read this - it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then - I'll have been gone a long time. I'll know most of what there is to know about being dead, but I'll probably keep it to myself. That seems to be the way of things."
"... and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent."
"So the congregation took up collections to put him in college and then to send him to Germany. And he came back an atheist. That's what he always to be, at any rate."
"We'd go through the possibilities we were aware of. There weren't many."
"You may not remember me at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you."
"But in fact one lapse in judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible."
"I have been thinking lately how I have loved my physical life."
"These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice."
"I never dared to ask him what he'd been up to. I couldn't risk the possibility of knowing things that were worse than my suspicions."
"It was kindly intended, but not considerate, I understand that."
"Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience... How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance to we perform it?"
"... she did by loving that unremarkable book so much that I noticed and read it, too. That was providence telling me what she could not have told me."
"I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am."
"Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense."
"... just an old man struggling with the difficulty of understanding what it is he's struggling with."
"I truly suspect I never left because I was afraid I would not come back."
"How could I accept the advice of someone who had such a low estimation of me?"
"... and he would protect him like a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having."
"They mattered or they didn't and that's the end of it."
"Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view."
"I love this town. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love - I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence."
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