This is a work of memory -- facts have been altered. Names have been changed.

If you do not sow good deeds, you fail to flourish your soul garden.

Sufferings test strength of endurance.

Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life.

Next to the love of God, the love of country is the best preventive of crime.

I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.

Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.

I went through awkward, chubby, total weirdo phases.

In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.

The Blessed Eucharist is the perfect Sacrament of the Lord's Passion, since It contains Christ Himself and his Passion.