I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.

These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding. ... If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.

We [Americans] inherited British law, which is like the new "reforms" that are being made now, in the sense that people are permanently entrapped in debt, if they once fall into bankruptcy. The reason that the law was changed in American history - the whole early period of the formation of the country was moving away from British law into a law that is generated here and that conforms to the sense of what is appropriate here.

I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.

The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return. So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory - there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.

We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature.