“Books console us, calm us, prepare us, enrich us and redeem us.”
“A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.”
“Only what touches us closely preoccupies us. We prepare in solitude to face it. (The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion)”
“Anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to flee.”
“It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.”
“God taking from us and loving us at the same time by providing comforters was a kind of spiritual equanimity. It seemed a phenomenon of life how a death insinuates us into the debt of those who stand by us in trouble and console us.”