One more

I finished my book!  I really didn't have that much more to go.  But, in the last pages, a moving passage:

This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway.  It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there is swells and comforts.  It gives us second wind, third winds, hundredth winds....When someone enters that valley with you, that mud, it somehow saves you again.  At the marsh, all that mud and one old friend worked like a tenderizing mallet.  Where before there had been tough fibers, hardness, and held breath, now there were mud, dirt, water, air, mess - and I felt soft and clean.

[Sadly I started this post on Wednesday when I finished the book and and written a whole lot about this quote, but then it got erased by the internet gremlins.  Sad.]