“As so often happens, the thing left undone tires you most of all, you only feel rested when it has been accomplished.”

“Jenny Fields felt undone, the way only a person who has been careful can feel when confronted by a mistake.”

“This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can’t everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can’t go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it’s so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.”

“A wrongdoer is often a man who has left something undone, not always one who has done something.”

“bad things, like good things don't happen any more often than they ought to by chance. the universe has no mind, no feelings, and no personality, so it doesn't do things in order to either hurt or please you. bad things happen because things happen.”

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”