The best marriages, like the best lives, were both happy and unhappy. There was even a kind of necessary tension, a certain tautness between the partners that gave the marriage strength, like the tautness of a full sail. You went forward on it.

Travel Far, Pay No Fare... a book can take you anywhere.

These bright roofs, these steep towers, these jewel-lakes, these skeins of railroad line - all spoke to her and she answered. She was glad they were there. She belonged to them and they to her. . . . She had not lost it. She was touching it with her fingertips. This was flying: to go swiftly over the earth you loved, touching it lightly with your fingertips, holding the railroads lines in your hand to guide you, like a skein of wool in a spider-web game - like following Ariadne's thread through the Minotaur's maze, Where would it lead, where?

To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.

I think one must do the thing -- whatever it is (and it changes from time to time) -- that unites you to the flowing stream of the world. At any price, one must do it first. Otherwise one can do nothing, nothing at all. One is out of touch, out of grace.

In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other.

Marriage should, I think, always be a little bit hard and new and strange. It should be breaking your shell and going into another world, and a bigger one.