That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth.

Never, ever condescend to the reader. Assume you are writing for someone better and smarter than you are. This will protect you from conventionalism, faddishness, and cliché.

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

Generosity is also an act of freedom, a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.

More generally, people who lived in a period when maternal, infant and childhood mortality were still high would have been tougher than most of us can imagine.

We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

... but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.