“It's a different sort of love taht puts up with illness. Old love.”

“...because love can come, if you believe in it and behave as if it exists. That was the case, too, with free will; with perhaps, fath of any sort; and love was a sort of faith, was it not?”

“Many waters cannot quench love: the anthem's setting remained in her ears, repeating itself; a tune so powerful that it might gird one against the disappointments of life, rather than make one aware that our attempts to subdue the pain of unrequited love - of impossible love, of love that we are best to put away and not to think about - tended not to work, and only made the wounds of love more painful.”

“And then the second thing you have to do is go and see your son. That is a duty of love, Andrew. It's as simple as that. A duty of love. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?”

“The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.”

“As a girl she had imagined the Milky Way was the curtain of heaven, a notion she had been sorry to abandon as she had grown up. But she would not abandon a belief in heaven itself, wherever that may be, because she felt that if she gave that up then there would be very little left. Heaven may not turn out to be the place of her imagining, she conceded--the place envisaged in the old Botswana stories, a place inhabited by gentle white cattle, with sweet breath--but it would surely be something not too unlike that, at least in the way it felt; a place where late people would be give all that they had lacked on this earth--a place of love for those who had not been loved, a place where those who had had nothing would find they had everything the human heart could desire.”

“Tea, for me, is one of the great subjects. It is a romatic trade, it does not pollute excessively, it has all sorts of health benefits, it calms and wakes you up at the same time.”