It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.

For always in her there was a dark place full of despair and a great dividing force to make meaning because there was none.

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

I never lie," I said offhand. "At least not to those I don't love.

Remember always, he said, that nothing is as precious to us as the magnificent gift of life. Let the moon and the stars always remind you of this-that though we are tiny creatures in this universe, we are filled with life.

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

It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn’t see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.