“Yet he saw that in all places there was originality, resulting from the human efforts at decoration and ingenious methods of survival.”

“Human relationships were so complicated and always veering in the direction of the irrational.”

“Solitude is the natural dwelling place of truth…It is there you will wrestle. It is there you will be tested by fire and by darkness. ”

“[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in.”

“Happy Christmas" was their version of "Merry Christmas," and a better version, it seemed to him, for making merry was different from making happiness.”

“Emotions, he was certain, were unreliable and irrelevant to the labor of religious faith.”

“Love is the soul of the world, though its body bleeds, and we must learn to bleed with it. Love is also the seed and milk and the fruit of the world, though we can partake of it in greed or reverence. We are born, we eat, and learn, and die. We leave a tracery of messages in the lives of others, a little shifting of the soil, a stone moved from here to there, a word uttered, a song, a poem left behind. I was here, each of these declare. I was here.”