“What is it about beauty that intimidates; causing us to kneel somewhere deep inside and pray and wonder just how close we might crawl before being banished from the sanctuary?”

“I wonder if to be human is to know that we can't ever banish pain and ugliness from the world, only learn from it and create something beautiful and good out of it ...”

“We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

“I would listen to her soft voice and wonder if, somewhere deep inside, she was screaming, too.”

“How easy it is for men to talk about beauty, and how subtly intimidating when they do.”

“So if anyone is to declare how the all was in this way genuinely born, he must also mix in the form of the wandering cause-how it is its nature to sweep things around. In this way, then, we must retreat, and, by taking in turn another, new beginning suited to these very matters, just as in what was before us earlier, so too in what is before us now, we must begin again from the beginning.”