And so it was. At breakfast the next morning Adam said, “Boys, Lee is going away.” “Is he?” said Cal. “There’s a basketball game tonight, costs ten cents. Can we go?” “Yes. But did you hear what I said?” “Sure,” Aron said. “You said Lee’s going away.” “But he’s not coming back.” Cal asked, “Where’s he going?” “To San Francisco to live.” “Oh!” said

Go through the motions, Adam.” “What motions?” “Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.” “Why should I?” Adam asked. Samuel was looking at the twins. “You’re going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles.

You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they

Cyrus was deeply moved and he spoke as he had never spoken before.

people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule—a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.”

And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one

Debt was an ugly word and an ugly concept to Olive. A bill unpaid past the fifteenth of the month was a debt. The word had connotations of dirt and slovenliness and dishonor.