If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.

The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.

I would certainly never consider myself a Renaissance Man; I'm not fit to look at the dust from the chariot wheels of many of those who have gone before me.

It is not enough just to identify a problem; there are plenty of people who were very skilled at pointing out what was wrong with the world, but they were not always so adept at working out how these things could be righted.

I have three older sisters, so we were a reasonably large family and, in general, a happy one.

How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?...only the completely happy think that they are in the correct place.

When we love others, we naturally want to talk about them, we want to show them off, like emotional trophies. We invest them with a power to do to others what they do to us; a vain hope, as the lovers of others are rarely of much interest to us. But we listen in patience, as friends must, and as Isabel now did, refraining from comment, other than to encourage the release of the story and the attendant confession of human frailty and hope.