To every soul, God will look like its first love because He IS its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it - made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process. It needs not a map, but a history, and if I don't stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there's no reason why I should ever stop.

People blush at praise--not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs.

Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.

And so take away his work, which was his life [. . .] and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?

The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth-- the very thing the whole story has been about.

Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.