Despair is deadly sin, but worse, it is mortal folly.

If ever you do go back, what is it you want of Evesham?" "Do I know? [...] The silence, it might be ... or the stillness. To have no more running to do ... to have arrived, and have no more need to run. The appetite changes. Now I think it would be a beautiful thing to be still.

Youth is no less vulnerable, by the very quality it has of making the heart ache that beholds and has lost it.

the success of a holiday depends on what you find for yourself on the spot, not what you bring with you.

Life goes not in a straight line, lad, but in a circle. The first half we spend venturing as far as the world's end from home and kin and stillness, and the latter half brings us back, by roundabout ways but surely, to that state from which we set out.

Truth, like the burgeoning of a bulb under the soil, however deeply sown, will make its way to the light.

Only people who're positive enough to have friends have enemies. When you're as glum and morose as he was, people just give up and go away.