“And the funny thing was if you made the best of it, if you smiled through every storm, the bad things were never as terrible as you expected them to be, and the good things were better than anything you could have wished for yourself.”

“Her mother said that three great powers kept the universe going. The first and the strongest was God. Each of the two additional powers was as strong as the other: love and imagination. OF the three, God and love were always good. Imagination, however, could be good or bad. Mozart imagined great music into existence. Hitler imagined death camps and built them. Imagination was so powerful that you had to be careful because you could imagine things into existence that you might regret, Everything in the universe was an idea before it was real.”

“Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace”

“If this was the best wine that Jim and Nora could afford or, worse, if this was their idea of a good wine - well, sadly, then they were better off dead.”

“He said, if you allow yourself to be enchanted by the beauty to be seen in even ordinary things, then all things proved to be extraordinary.”

“To do...what you feel sure is right and in the aid of justice, you sometimes have to do things that...make you wonder if in fact you are the good man that you like to believe you are.”

“Imagination was so powerful that you had to be careful because you could imagine things into existence that you might regret.”