“I mean that the book had better make life better better in at least six or seven definite ways immediately. Also, there had better be somewhere in it a method for handling fortune and chance so as to best provoke the most complicated, involved, and glorious refractions of what's possible.”

“You live your life, you try to live compassionately, and that's the end of it. You do a little more than you should have to in order to be a good person, but you don't go making big changes in the world, trying to fix things. It presumes too much to do so. There's only this: if everyone acts quietly, compassionately, things will go a little better than they would have otherwise. But people will still suffer.”

“Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another.”

“…In this way that he sought to control the very passage of his life, deftly and without forethought, yet precisely and with enormous care. Part of it was to allow what was enormous, what was profound, without limiting it.”

“-Lara is a weasel. I've always hated her. The only happy week I had as a child was when she fell from the roof and went into a coma. She came out of it, though. Everyone was so happy.-Is that true? asked James.-No, said Grieve. But they would have been happy. Everyone thinks she's so clever. And I would be happy if she went away and never came back.”

“…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. ""What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?”

“I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.”