Michael Lee West

This is how the soul heals. it thaws out bit by bit, the way the ground warms after a hard winter. you notive the sun or hear the whippoorwill calling across the flats. You sweep your porch, go drink coffee in the shade of the trumpet vines. You have days where you want to lay down and die, but what you learn is this: As long as there's somebody left on this earth who loves you, it's reason enough to stay alive. You don't give in to your broke heart-- you just let the wide, cracked space fill up again.

There was another thing I had forgotten about the South: It was the one place on earth where an unsuspecting person could get killed by kindness.

I was tired of well-meaning folks, telling me it was time I got over being heartbroke. When somebody tells you that, a little bell ought to ding in your mind. Some people don't know grief from garlic grits. There's somethings a body ain't meant to get over. No I'm not suggesting you wallow in sorrow, or let it drag on; no I am just saying it never really goes away. (A death in the family) is like having a pile of rocks dumped in your front yard. Every day you walk out and see them rocks. They're sharp and ugly and heavy. You just learn to live around them the best way you can. Some people plant moss or ivy; some leave it be. Some folks take the rocks one by one, and build a wall.

But it comes to me that two wrongs don't make another wrong.

Work and pray, live on hay,You'll get pie in the sky when you die.-Joe Hill, The Preacher and the Slave

There is a sneakiness about girls that they keep hid under sweetness and pouting and crying.

Everybody's always doing the same old things--- you know, doing unto others before they can do unto you.

You raise them half-decent, and they grow up and leave. They move to Miami or California-- someplace with gourmet groceries and nude beaches because you've reared them to cook good and be liberal minded. It's just the opposite with your failures-- them kids stick to your tail like a cocklebur. You'd think it would be the other way around, but it's not. No matter how old I get, this will always amaze me.

It's hard to explain your passions, but sometimes it is harder to live them.

He just knew we would find luck, but believing something don't make it true.

It paid to be cultured, just as long as you didn't start growing bacteria.

Now that Olive was grown, I didn't know what to do with myself. You could build your life around one single thing, like a view or a child, but that was risky. You had so much to lose.