We should be careful of the insults we fling at others, lest they return and land at our feet, newly minted to apply to those who had first coined them.

Everything has been something before.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realize how widespread envy was.

I am capable of being idle.

We don't forget.... Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.

I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.