“He had discovered that the choice between self-love or love of something other than self offers no escape from suffering either way, it is merely a choice between two woundings, of the pride or of the heart.”

“Someone once said to me,said Marguerite, that our home, our special country, is where we find liberation. I suppose she meant that it is where our souls find it easiest to escape from self, and it seem to me that it is that way with us when what is about us echoes the best that we are.”

“We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear," he said. "Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.”

“In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried ... nothing is so warming and companionable.”

“In what he suffered, as in all true suffering and in true joy, there was the quality of eternity. He could not believe it would ever end.”

“For she had discovered that as well as the evil web there was another. This too bound spirits together, but not in a tangle, it was a patterned web and one could see the silver pattern when the sun shone upon it. It seemed much frailer than the dark tangle, that had a hideous strength, but it might not be so always, not in the final reckoning.”

“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.”