“I knew, as every peasant does, that land can never be truly owned. We are the keepers of the soil, the curators of trees.”

“A tree grows into the air because it grows out of the air. The bulk of the tree is not made from the soil beneath- indeed, the soil is in large part made by the tree. Both soil and tree are made from the sun and wind and rain. The land is just a place to stand.”

“Far from being writers—founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses—readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves.”

“We thought we knew everything about him. But that's not how life is. When all's said and done, we can never truly know one another.”

“The immature conscience is not its own master. It simply parrots the decisions of others. It does not make judgments of its own; it merely conforms to the judgments of others. That is not real freedom, and it makes true love impossible, for if we are to love truly and freely, we must be able to give something that is truly our own to another. If our heart does not belong to us, asks Merton, how can we give it to another?”

“A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and perplexities. We are all our own curators. ”