“Let's just go in and enjoy ourselves,' Yvonne had said after a long moment when the Hitchens family had silently reviewed the menu—actually of the prices not the courses—outside a restaurant on our first and only visit to Paris. I knew at once that the odds against enjoyment had shortened (or is it lengthened? I never remember).”

“Rather than meansuring our experiences against our ideal and coming up short we should enjoy the great blessings of the moment. When I let go of what I thought was supposed to be and began to accept what the Lord had planned for me I let go of any disappointment and bitterness I felt.”

“If I could prescribe a single rule for looking at a work of art it would be to enjoy it. If we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit we enjoy our tears just as much as we enjoy our laughter. The only moments of life that are a bore are when we don't care one way or another.”

“I'm not going to let you go " He was silent for a moment. "Carly " he said gently. "Remember when we were first engaged”

“We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in Germany.Of course, I had always known that he had served in World War II and been captured, just like I had always know the stories about my grandmother and the build of their house. It's that peculiar type of family memory, where someone has obviously told you but you were too young to remember actually hearing it, so it seems like knowledge that was instilled at birth. Papa never brought it up, and my parents said they hadn't heard him mention it once in the previous fifty years. But suddenly, he was talking.”

“How could you begin?’ said she. ‘I can comprehend your going on when you had once made a beginning, but what could set you off in the first place?’ ‘I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which had laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”