It's not so," I said. "And how long do you think it will sustain you, feeling and seeing and touching and tasting, if there is no love? No one with you?

And books, they offer one hope -- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

There's a virtue,' Felix said, 'to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth.

We live in a world full of accidents finally in which on aesthetic principles have a consistency of which we can be sure. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever striving to create and maintain an ethical balance. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever, striving to create and maintain an ethical balance; but the shimmer of summer rain under the street lamps or the great flashing glare of artillery against a night sky – such brutal beauty is beyond dispute.

when we are weary, we speak lovingly of dreams as if they embodied our true deisres-What we WOULD have when that which we DO have so sorely disappoints us

I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.

I wish we had more visible Christian and Catholic leaders who talked about love.