“Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred; since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other; only the indolence of human nature finds it so hard to pierce through to the other side.”

“All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.”

“There was a leap of joy in him, like a flame lighting up in a dark lantern. At this moment he believed it was worth it. This moment of supreme beauty was worth all the wretchedness of the journey. It was always worth it. "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." It was the central truth of existence, and all men knew it, though they might not know that they knew it. Each man followed his own star through so much pain because he knew it, and at journey's end all the innumerable lights would glow into one.”

“Cousin Mary hoped her journey through periods of dark and light was like that of a Swiss train toiling up the mountainside, in and out of tunnels but always a little farther up the hill at each emergence. But she could only hope that this was so, she did not feel it. It seemed to her that she did not advance at all and that what she was learning now was only to hold on. The Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, she remembered, had had to run fast merely to stay where she was, but doubtless she had run in hope, disdaining despair; and hope, Cousin Mary discovered, when deliberately opposed to despair, was one of the tough virtues.”

“Fairyland...Paradise...In this place and at this time, Marguerite could know that the one was a parable of the other and both were synonyms for something that had no name.”

“Yet surely that story she had imagined was a real thing? If you created a story with your mind surely it was just as much there as a piece of needlework that you created with your fingers? You could not see it with your bodily eyes, that was all....the invisible world must be saturated with the stories that men tell both in their minds and by their lives. They must be everywhere, these stories, twisting together, penetrating existence like air breathed into the lungs, and how terrible, how awful, thought Henrietta, if the air breathed should be foul. How dare men live, how dare they think or imagine, when every action and every thought is a tiny thread to ar or enrich that tremendous tapestried story that man weaves on the loom that God has set up, a loom that stretches from heaven above to hell below, and from side to side of the universe...”

“Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people - those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food;”