It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it

Sarah had a saying: Der gleichster veg iz ful mit shtainer." "What's it mean?" "The smoothest way is sometimes full of stones.

I wondered how it could be that people could love God and hate one another.

Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust?

And what if I fail?" "Ah! Then you'll have a story to tell.

Practice at hunger makes the fast easier.

The smoothest way is sometimes full of stones.

There is nothing wrong with you. God asks the most of those he loves best.

He grieved too, Klara said, for the loss of a certain idea of himself.

Life, oblivious to his grief, continued

Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

Sometimes . . . we grow homesick for heaven. Many times in the midst of the sin, suffering, and sorrow of this life there is a tug at our soul. That is homesickness coupled with anticipation.

It was a great escape for me and it was a way to take a break from what was going on in my own world, to go into another world.

I have lived and worked in Britain all my life. Not even in the dark days of penal Labour taxation in the Seventies did I have any intention of leaving the country of my birth.

The sad truth is that societies that demand whistleblowers be martyrs often find themselves without either, and always when it matters the most.

Well, I've never really been one to try to be politically correct. I just feel truth is truth, and sometimes I probably offend some people.

Nihilism: any aim is lacking, any answer to the question "why" is lacking. What does nihilism mean?--that the supreme values devaluate themselves.

My observation is that whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty... it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

This is servitude, To serve the unwise.