A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.

When you're at war, you think about a better life; when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.

That’s what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness. -Simon Stimson, OUR TOWN

The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.

Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.

[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.