“He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.”

“...like many another self-educated man, he attached an exaggerated importance to the knowledge he had so painfully acquired and could not resist the temptation to parade it,...”

“As a girl she had imagined the Milky Way was the curtain of heaven, a notion she had been sorry to abandon as she had grown up. But she would not abandon a belief in heaven itself, wherever that may be, because she felt that if she gave that up then there would be very little left. Heaven may not turn out to be the place of her imagining, she conceded--the place envisaged in the old Botswana stories, a place inhabited by gentle white cattle, with sweet breath--but it would surely be something not too unlike that, at least in the way it felt; a place where late people would be give all that they had lacked on this earth--a place of love for those who had not been loved, a place where those who had had nothing would find they had everything the human heart could desire.”

“It was not a safe thing to lead Joe into temptation; he had no resistance to it at all.”

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. . .Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.”

“He had illuminated the heartbreaking cruelty of war: When men who fight become nothing, only packages of bones and blood deposited in the earth with no clarion call to memory, those they love are left without a way to make such devastating loss hold meaning.”