Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.

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.

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

Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion - that everything must finally be made comprehensible - then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for , if not to be knit up finally?

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

I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.