Home (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

She was good in the fullest and narrowest sense of the word as it is applied to female children. And she had blossomed into exactly the sort of adult her childhood predicted. Ah well.

If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.

Fealty to kin, actual and imagined, and the protection of them, possible or not, were their father’s pride, his strongest instinct, and his chief source of satisfaction, frustration, and anxiety.

The garden gave her a perfectly good reason not to be anywhere else, not to do anything else. And it always needed more time than she could give it.

The letters were so precious to her, and what were they? They were bland and prosaic, three readings out of four. But when they touched her, she was suffused with joy. There was no other word for it. She knew that if she had kept them, she would still look at them to see if there was anything in them to account for the sweet power they had had for

But his reservations were the fruit of his experience, and his experience was the fruit of his being Jack, always Jack, despite these sporadic and intense attempts at escape, at being otherwise.

Experience had taught them that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness.

“Survival on terms I could convince myself were tolerable. That was the pinnacle of my aspirations. I did not anticipate failure. I have awakened in the occasional gutter from time to time—figuratively speaking, of course—and I have thought to myself, Just a little effort would improve my situation dramatically. So there was that optimism. It may h

Young people want the world to change and old people want it to stay the same. And who is to judge between thee and me? We just have to forgive each other.”