“I saw how greatly he suffered the requirement of being clever. It separated him from his soul, and it didn’t get him anything other than a living.”

“She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity.”

“Justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected. A miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned. Whoever knows this is willing to suffer, for he knows that nothing is in vain.”

“I like the race, rather than the winning.Do you really?Yes, I've imagined great victories, and I've imagined great races. The races are better.”

“Not surprisingly, he began to sing, and because no one in the world could hear him, and he sang without inhibition, he sang well.”

“Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived.”

“He had known in times of the greatest misery or danger that his dreams of home, in which all things seemed beautiful, were in essence his longing for the woman for whom he had been made. That was how, as a soldier, he had seen it, and it was how he had come through.”