The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe.

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.

Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar.

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.

God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

It is often little things that are hardest to stand.