“I believe that love is better than hate. And that there is more nobility in building a chicken coop than in destroying a cathedral.”

“Bending beats breaking.”

“it's better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse.”

“But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.”

“When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.”

“I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the possibility of love dying.”

“I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.”