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.

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.

The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.