“Before big bridges, deep tunnels and the advent of health and safety regulations, there were many ways to cross rivers. They would use rowing boats, rickety rafts or in the absence of a vessel, swim or wade. Everyone knew what a stepping-stone was. They all understood that it was not something that you would want to stand on for any length of time. It was a means to an end, an important point and a route from A to B.”

“• If there is anything i have learned from being a Marine is that "i can't" is a lie and that your body can be pushed past any limit if you are mentally strong. – Johnathan Pannell”

“In your journey through New England,' he wrote, 'Would you be willing to visit Northampton? You have the blessing of Heaven with you wherever you go, and I have a desire, if it be the will of God, that same blessing may come down on this town.”

“So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love - loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.”

“But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

“They say you should know your limits and work within them. But how can you really know your limits unless you try to expand them?”

“Why do we love the idea that people might be secretly working together to control and organise the world? Because we don't like to face the fact that our world runs on a combination of chaos, incompetence and confusion.”