Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.

love had turned into "love affair" with a begining and an end.

With Your great schemes, You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.

Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.

A solitary laugh is often a laugh of superiority.