The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.

Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.

It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.

What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?