His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.

Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!

To abandon a child, she had once said to someone, when she thought Cassandra couldn't hear, was an act so cold, so careless, it refused forgiveness.

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.

Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.

The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.

Because desperate people cling to hope like sailors to their wreaks.

But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.

I don’t want to accidentally end up looking back on my life to find that I’m ashamed of myself, I want to live a life I can be proud of.

To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something precious.

Who says I like right angles? These are not my laws, these are not my rules.

I hope it does not take the rest of my life until I find what it is I've been looking for.

It is often said that reading is a gift, but to my mind that is an insufficient description, for the size of the gift of reading is so vast that it is difficult to see what is outside its wrapping.

Enjoy the experience, don't just experience the experience

I cannot spare the luxury of believing that all things beautiful are what they seem.

It's been one of the most important tools for me in personal growth for understanding myself, how I am, and what effect I do have on other people.

Being a mathematician is a bit like being a manic depressive: you spend your life alternating between giddy elation and black despair.

And it is through conflict that God induces the believer to seek and to grasp total triumph in Christ.