Love

"That's all we need to do in this life - find the single feature in  each friend, the one really essential quality and then love them for it. When my mother checked to make sure the door was locked, even after she'd already checked a dozen times, even when she was at last sitting in the front seat of the car, in her place in the passenger seat next to my indulgent father, still she always had to get out and check the door one more time - and it wasn't good enough to watch my father do it, she had to do it herself.

How that set my teeth on edge, I'd wait in the backseat literally grinding my jaws together. But she'd grown up with nothing and now she had a nice house full of nice things - of course she would have to make sure the door was locked again and again. Who in their right mind would trust such luck? The important thing is not that she checked the lock, but that she was once so poor and she never, never forgot it. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by that. Think of all the anger I wasted on locks when I should've been thinking about poverty.

But that's just the way it is with the truth, it's never in the same room with you, it's never in the backseat with you, it's never there when you need it. It always bobs up years later like a waterbird that dives in one part of the lake and pops up in another. You grab for the truth with both hands and it pops up behind you..."

Page 151, 'The Winter Vault', Anne Michaels