I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.

To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.

I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.

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.