Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery.

They'd never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they'd been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.

The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build.

It's been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.

The colossal might of wickedness: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.

Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.

And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.