For I did not want him to see, or to question me, for here contains already secrets, and my secrets are my fortune and my sanity.

What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?

There is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is friendship.

It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood.

Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one.

The world is not full of betrayers, it is full of people with decent motives and a full desire to do right by those who know them and love them. This is a little-known truth, but I think it is a truth nonetheless. Empirically, from all the years of my work, I would attest to that. I know it is a miraculous conclusion, but there it is. We like to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer.

It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.