I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.

Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.

She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.