Hannah Coulter

“All women is brothers,” Burley Coulter used to say, and then look at you with a dead sober look as if he didn’t know why you thought that was funny. (Location 338)

When he came to work in the morning, Wheeler was like a drawn bow —lean and tense and entirely aimed at whatever he had to do. (Location 362)

They were men with long memories who loved farming and whose lives had been given to ideals: good land, good grass, good animals, good crops, good work. (Location 368)

Virgil spoke of that as something old in the world that caused an ancient happiness in him. (Location 443)

Of all the compliments Uncle Jack’s were the best, though he only increased the compliments of other people. He ate with great hunger and relish, and it was a joy to watch him. When somebody would say, “That is a wonderful ham” or “This dressing is perfect,” Uncle Jack would solemnly shake his head and say, “Ay Lord, it is that!” And his words fell upon the table like a blessing. (Location 611)

You could say that Port William has never been the same place two minutes together. But I think any way it has ever been it will always be. It is an immortal place. Some day there will be a new heaven and a new earth and a new Port William coming down from heaven, adorned as a bride for her husband, and whoever has known her before will know her then. (Location 662)

I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want. (Location 904)

I never caught him sneaking a look. He looked at you with a look that was entirely direct, entirely clear. His look said, “Here I am, as I am, like it or not.” There was no apology in his look and no plea, but there was purpose. (Location 977)

It was what he had learned to want in the midst of killing and dying, terror, cruelty, hate, hunger, thirst, blood, and fire. (Location 1018)

Members of Port William aren’t trying to “get someplace.” They think they are someplace. (Location 1022)

Now I know what we were trying to stand for, and what I believe we did stand for: the possibility that among the world’s wars and sufferings two people could love each other for a long time, until death and beyond, and could make a place for each other that would be a part of their love, as their love for each other would be a way of loving their place. This love would be one of the acts of the greater love that holds and cherishes all the world. (Location 1024)

a long detour through the hell that humans have learned to make, (Location 1027)

People know more about each other than what they tell each other, and I knew that certain things were obvious. (Location 1052)

Maybe the world is waiting for you to give yourself to it. Maybe it’s only then that things can work themselves out. (Location 1070)

Most people now are looking for “a better place,” which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. (Location 1257)

And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven. (Location 1260)

We lived here by our work. Our life and our work were not the same thing maybe, but they were close. (Location 1359)

This membership had an economic purpose and it had an economic result, but the purpose and the result were a lot more than economic. (Location 1435)

It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. (Location 1622)

The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children’s education. (Location 1702)

The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else. In order to move up, you have got to move on. (Location 1702)

it turned my mind inside out like a sock. (Location 1709)

Suppose your stories, instead of mourning and rejoicing over the past, say that everything should have been different. Suppose you encourage or even just allow your children to believe that their parents ought to have been different people, with a better chance, born in a better place. Or suppose the stories you tell them allow them to believe, when they hear it from other people, that farming people are inferior and need to improve themselves by leaving the farm. Doesn’t that finally unmake everything that has been made? Isn’t that the loose thread that unravels the whole garment? (Location 1726)

I was spending too much time telling her things she had already figured out for herself. (Location 1744)

I wanted Margaret to go to college, but when she actually went away it broke my heart. Maybe if you had enough children you could get used to those departures, but, having only three, I never did. I felt them like amputations. (Location 1766)

They were hardly going to be able to breathe without paying somebody for the privilege. (Location 1823)

There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. (Location 1963)

For a while, especially if you have children, you shape your life according to expectations. That is arguably pretty foolish, for expectation can be a bucketful of smoke. (Location 1993)

After your expectations have gone their way and your future is getting along the best it can as an honest blank, you shape your life according to what it is. (Location 1996)

And that was the harshest criticism he ever made of the children: “You’re acting like a damned employee.” (Location 2030)

It used to be that we sort of knew, we could sort of guess, how the lives closest to us would end, what beds our dearest ones were likely to die in, and who would be with them at the last. Now, in this world of employees, of jobs and careers, there is no way even to imagine. (Location 2041)

When love for a place is not living in it, you will know just by driving by it on the road. (Location 2120)

“That would take a world of time and trouble, Hannah. It would have been better for Marcus if he had been tireder at night.” (Location 2188)

Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustn’t shirk it. Love, after all, “hopeth all things.” But maybe you must learn, and it is hard learning, not to hope out loud, especially for other people. You must not let your hope turn into expectation. (Location 2237)

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. (Location 2270)

Hell is a shameful place, and it is hard to speak of what you know of it. (Location 2542)

You can’t give yourself over to love for somebody without giving yourself over to suffering. (Location 2596)

Our life in our place had been a benediction to him, but he had seen it always within a circle of fire that might have closed upon it. (Location 2624)

The old thrift that once kept us alive has been replaced by extravagance and waste. People are living as if they think they are in a movie. They are all looking in one direction, toward “a better place,” and what they see is no thicker than a screen. (Location 2722)

For the coming of knowledge that will make us a community again? (Location 2750)

When you have gone too far, as I think he did, the only mending is to come home. (Location 2812)