whatever devotion to something else there was in him had been made impure by church taken as a weekly, dutiful thing.

You can reconstruct the picture from chaos and memory's ruins.

Springtime is a season we tend to forget as we grow older, and yet far back in our memories, like the landscape of a country visited long ago, it's always there.

Drink was the most fearsome of deceivers ... for it promised one thing and came through with quite another.

whatever devotion to something else there was in him had been made impure by church taken as a weekly, dutiful thing.

There is only one history of any importance, and it is the history of what you once believed in, and the history of what you came to believe in.

Because of my mother, who gave me definitions, I knew what I was committed to in life. ... I had the most satisfactory of childhoods because Mother, small, delicate-boned, witty, and articulate, turned out to be exactly my age.