Garrison Keillor Christmas Quotes

A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.

Don't worry about the past and don't try to figure out the future

You are the benefactor of great kindness. And you have no idea how much goodness is lavished on the world by invisible hands. Small selfless deeds engender tremendous force against the darker powers. Great kindness pervades this world, struggling against pernicious selfishness and vulgar narcissism and the vicious streak that is smeared across each human heart — great bounding goodness is rampant and none of it is wasted. No, these small gifts of goodness — this is what saves the soul of man from despair, and that is what preserves humanity from the long fall from the precipice into the abyss.

We got a bad case of head lice that winter and Aunt Cooter went berserk. Remember that? She was running from room to room, crying out about seeing Jesus up on high and trying to takeher clothes off — she was yelling, 'I want to put on the new raiment! Put away this old raiment, put on the new raiment!' Boy, that got tiresome real fast. We kept wrapping her up in sheets and she kept ripping them off. She'd been weak and puny for years but suddenly she had strength in her arms. It happens when people go berserk. I read that somewhere. We just ran out of patience. We threatened to put her in the loony bin but she was seeing Jesus so it didn't matter to her. Finally we had to give her a tranquilizer and I guess we overtranquilized her because she died. But she went quietly in her sleep, which was how she always wanted to go. And she saw Jesus, so that must have been a comfort. It was too cold to bury her right away, the ground was frozen so hard. They were going to use dynamite but the families of other dead people objected to that, so we just put her in the tool shed until spring. Stood her up and leaned her against the lumber pile.

On the walls were large color photographs — three feet by four — landscapes — corn stubble, a snowy field, a creekbed with three big cottonwood trees rising from it, an abandoned farm site, another abandoned farm site, and then a full frontal view of a naked woman of advanced years, in black-and-white. He didn't want to look at it but it was hard not to. "That's a self-portrait," she said. He had guessed as much. "It took me forty years to get up the courage to do that," she said. He thought it might've been better if she hadn't waited so long but he didn't say anything.