A Thousand Acres

All I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn’t forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can’t stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That’s my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment.

She dressed to look good, and I dressed for obscurity.

Shame is a distinct feeling. I couldn’t look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled, wanting desperately to fall silent, grow smaller. More than that, I was uncomfortably conscious of my whole body, from the awkward way that the shafts of my hair were thrusting out of my scalp to my feet, which felt dirty as well as cold. Everywhere, I seemed to feel my skin from the inside, as if it now stood away from my flesh, separated by a millimeter of mortified space.

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.

Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had but actually you never know just by remembering how many there were to have faced.

We’re not going to be sad. We’re going to be angry until we die. It’s the only hope.

It is hard to know whether an air of self-confidence precedes or follows success.

Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.

I always feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don’t, sort of puffs you up.

They throw themselves on the waters of the world, and they know they will be borne up.

I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.

Even though I felt her presence, I also felt the habitual fruitlessness of thinking about her. Her images, partly memories of her, partly memories of photos I had seen of her, yielded no new answers to old mysteries.

Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who’ve really faced the facts.

I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.