“These days, people spent too much time striving to understand their feelings - and then ended up with none that were genuine.”

“If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character motivations.”

“The only way back from such a bleak despondency is to shape humiliation into humility, to strive always to triumph over the darkness while never forgetting that the honor and the beauty are more in the striving than in the winning. When triumph at last comes, our efforts alone could not have won the day without that grace which surpasses all understanding and which will, if we allow it, imbue our lives with meaning.”

“No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is...dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals, with loving one place-home-above all others.I embrace the world on a scale that allows genuine love-the small places like a town, a neighborhood, a street-and I love life, because of what the beauty of this world and of this life portend.”

“Too many dogs continue to be abused and abandond - one is too many - and people continue to kill people for money and envy and no reason at all. Bad people succeed and good people fail, but that's not the end of the story. Miracles happen that nobody sees, and among us walk heroes who are never recognised, and people live in loneliness because they cannot believe they are loved”

“It seems reckless, even perverse, to spend so much time and effort nurturing such a deadly thing...Ernie and Pooka seek to understand death and to master their fear of it by domesticating it in the form of the brugmansia.”

“Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.”