Then, are you master of us all? You didn't teach her that. Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience?

Sweet to think on it, that when we are last weary of all this world there is the rising sun

For me, places have a tremendous impact. I fall in love with places. All of life seems different in different places.

To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost." So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions." An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.

When you find out there is no ultimate good and evil in which you can place your faith, the world does not fall apart at the seams. It simply means that every decision is more difficult, more critical, because you are creating the good and evil yourself and they are very real.

Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.

The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.