The Way I see it

"You stand there looking at a bare mantel and the house gets an eerie feel, as though it were haunted by a kind of nothingness, an absence of something that could have been, an absence of people who could have been living there, interacting with me, forcing me out of my day dreams. I stood for a while and heard the voices of children who didn't exist and felt the tender touch of a wife who wanted me to listen to her. I felt, at once, the absent glory of a life that could have been."

- Don Miller in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years p.76