"My father would put me on his shoulders so I could get the big view, and he'd talk about the wildflowers and grasses and clouds. He had a name for the bottom of the sky—'the hem of heaven.'"

"Too many of us make small lives for ourselves."

"Don't you see?" Mamah plunged in. "How can I know if this is what I should do if I don't go? If I don't have time to live over there with him, even briefly? You have a happy marriage. I don't. You played your cards right the first time. I didn't. Does that mean I have to play this hand to the bitter end, full of regret? Knowing I might have had the happiest life imaginable with the one man I love more than any other I have ever known?"

"I'm quite sure it hasn't been translated into English." She glanced into his eyes. "Don't laugh, but I feel as if I were meant to find it." ¶ "Perhaps you were." ¶ "Let's translate it together," she said. "We could actually bring this into English for the first time." ¶ Frank looked skeptical. "But my entire vocabulary is 'nein' and 'ja'." ¶ "That's not true. You know 'guten morgen'!" ¶ "Ja."

When Jessie died, it felt as if her soul just whooshed away. And what was left behind was some empty useless thing, no more sacred a vessel than an old suitcase. ¶ What had stunned Mamah about Jessie's death was how quickly, how utterly, the flesh made that transition from life force to breathless rag. What it had carried inside of it before, that brew of tenderness, wit, fierce loyalty, intelligence—the essence of Jessie—had simply vaporized.

"I remember just after Jessie's death," Mamah said. "I was at a church picnic, and there was a potato-sack race going on. I looked around at all these people hopping crazily along, each with one leg in a potato sack. They were laughing, but they were also quite serious about winning that race. And I remember thinking, 'Don't these people know they're going to die?'"

"Great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life's gracious gifts to the elect."

"She says that once love leaves a marriage, then the marriage isn't sacred anymore. But if a true, great love happens outside of marriage, it's sacred and has its own rights."

"Love is moral even without legal marriage."

"But marriage is immoral without love."

She felt a clarity, even more than before, as if she were viewing everything, even herself, from a distance. 'How small we humans are,' she thought. 'All our scrambling around, trying to buttress ourselves against death. All our efforts to insulate ourselves against uncertainty with codes of behavior and meaningless busyness.' ¶ How ridiculous it all seemed, when life itself was so short, so precious. To live dishonestly seemed a cowardly way to use up one's time. For all the troubles life had meted out to her, she thought, it had given her more extraordinary gifts.

What he kept from her, though, was what she kept from him—the terrible weight of remorse and doubt that daily, hourly sometimes, shifted inside like cargo.

To have a love so great for her child that she would give her up—she was stunned by it.

It was comforting to help people fling their hopes out into the ether on the long chance that something good would come back.

"What will you do if Frank returns to his wife? You'll have nothing." But Mamah felt now that if that came to be, she had more than nothing. She had whatever it was inside herself that made her survive.

"One day I woke up and thought, 'What have you done with your gifts? You've traded them for furniture.'"

Mamah stiffened as if she'd just discovered someone snooping around in her drawers.

"We have all our little battles going on inside."

Two years in a child's life is the distance between stars, she thought.

In the foreground, growing in ditches, sumac trees raised their deltoid fingertips, while in the far distance, hills receded in deepening grays.

For reporters who were supposed to be fiercely competitive, the men were behaving like old chums. They seemed to have formed a quick camaraderie, the way travelers do when they find themselves thrown together in a strange place.

Mamah knew Lucky for what he was a beggar who charmed scraps out of the toughest party.