Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.

The work reveals the creator - and as our universe in its vastness, its orderliness, its exquisite detail, tells us something of the One who made it, so a work of fiction, for better or worse, will reveal the writer.

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.

If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?

Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.

It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing - one of May Belle's puzzles with this huge gap where somebody's eye should have been. Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.

I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.