“Perhaps we are all too small-minded to glimpse creation, even out little corner of it.”

“Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers? Why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half earth's gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become.”

“Love is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.”

“A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin”

“We are in a tight corner, now, I agree. But we have been in tight corners before and come out of them. You have to be brave a little longer.”

“The politics of the last twenty years in Britain are liars' politics. The problem is we are ruled by the weak and the small-minded, who are too stupid to know that they are weak and small-minded.”