Wendell Hennan

“She has confided to her Aunt Daisy, for instance, that she can understand the genealogical phenomenon that as burst forth all around her. She finds it moving, she says to see men and women - though, oddly, they mostly women - tramping through cemeteries or else huddled over library tables in the university's records room, turning over the pages of county histories, copying names and dates into small spiral notebooks and imagining, hoping, that their unselfish labors will open up into a fabric of substance and comity. all they want is for their to be revealed as simple, honest, law-abiding folks, quiet in their accomplishments, faithful in their vows, cheerful, solvent, and well intentioned, and that their robustly rounded lives will push up against, and perhaps pardon, the contemporary plagues of displacement and disaffection.”
― Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries