Turns of Phrase

From The Memory of Old Jack - another Port William tale full of beauty and sorrow - come these turns of phrase as only Wendell Berry can spin:

"And always near him was the thought of the dead woman who had loved him as he was and of the living one who could not."

"It is the blessing and trial of his old age that his mind goes back to inhabit again and again the body of the man he was."

"He was her cross, and she bore him with a submission that, afterwards, chilled him to the bone." 

"His labor is no longer work, but a striving against the effrontery of circumstance."

"Lying in the bare room whose curtainless windows admitted the bright, implacable gaze of the stars, he knew that he had become the incarnation of his solitude."

Again, they must resume their journey, the long return of dust to dust."

"She wants what she cannot ask and he cannot give.  He sees it in her eyes.  It makes a sorrow in him that only his grave will heal."

"He became again the true husband of his land, but now  his work was healing."

"She had made of herself a sort of portable occasion for the ostentatious gifts of her husband."

"The cost of living beyond his time is putting up with the various noises and contraptions of these new times."

"Now he must cease to be a son to the old men and become a father to the young."