“The real act of will was not in the creating of a garden but in the sustaining, the continuous stand against wildness.”

“[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.”

“In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air.”

“Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.”

“Sorrow can be a bully.”

“There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.”

“Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.”