John Ehle

“Only the strong knew what suffering was. The weak never found themselves in the strong webs; the strong man was the one who found himself day and night bound and struggling, so that the work he did, the plotting and the owning and the buying, the decisions he made—and in a large family there had been many to make—were often hard-fibered.”

“What was his place? he wondered. Where was his world? He had sometimes stood on the riverbank and told himself: Deep down in the cold water is your world; a rock lashed to your feet is your clothing for that world. To enter it you need only to climb to the place above the rapids, where the pool is, where it is always calm, so it must be deep, and there bury yourself and leave a world that is not your own and find a garden, long fields already cleared and cribs already filled, a new place in which a weakness in a man is a matter for a word or chide, not a break through which the terrors of the world flow in.”