Quotes from Sharyn McCrumb

One of the gentleman guests chuckled. "Do you think the mother made up the story out of whole cloth?

That was when I realized how fragile a cultural tradition is. If just one generation breaks the chain, a bit of the family's cultural heritage can be lost forever. Each of us is the only link between the past and the future. All the songs and stories you heard from your elders, all the people you knew as a child who are gone now, all the family traditions—if you don't keep them alive by sharing them with the next generation, they will disappear.

yet for those of his generation, the time spent in war was often clearer than the recent past. Perhaps that was because cold, and fear, and the constant presence of death had formed an acid that etched the war memories indelibly in the mind. It had taken a long time for everyday life to override the stories of past battles that had once dominated the conversation whenever his old friends gathered.

Surely doctors saw nothing but the eyes of their patient's family: the staring, pleading eyes that waited to hear what sentence would be pronounced on their loved one.

Conflict is a form of intimacy, and he did not want to be close to anyone.

Maybe heaven is getting to live forever in one really wonderful moment....I've made a point of collecting happy moments, ones I might like to live in for all time.

Bonnenburger stopped listening, and went back to his book.

I'm sorry about the way it looks. . . People often said that when they let him in, as if he were a health inspector instead of a sheriff. He had once gone to arrest a murderer who had let him in with just those words. The only remorse she'd shown, in fact.

On one side of Ruben Mistral's weekly engagement calendar there was an astronomer's photo of the Horseshoe Nebula, a billion pinpoints of light making a haze in the blackness of space. Under the picture, Mistral had written: "This scene represents the number of meetings I attend per year!

I wonder which is worse-the death, not knowing what comes after, or the wedding, when you think you know, but you're wrong.

Life seems to be a choice between two wrong answers.