“There's a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be?”

“This one isn’t just any old horse. There’s a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be? I tell you, my friend, there’s divinity in a horse, and specially in a horse like this. God got it right the day he created them. And to find a horse like this in the middle of this filthy abomination of a war, is for me like finding a butterfly on a dung heap. We don’t belong in the same universe as a creature like this.”

“One evening, after he’d read a piece about yet another savagery in Bosnia, I saw there were tears in his eyes. ‘Don’t it ever stop?’ he said. ‘I can mind Father telling that there’d be no more wars, not after his one. It shames me. It shames all of us. What’s the good in reading, if that’s all there is to read about?”

“There's a mouse in here with me. He's sitting there in the light of the lamp, looking up at me. He seems as surprised to see me as I am to see him. There he goes. I can hear him still, scurrying about somewhere under the hayrick. I think he's gone now. I hope he comes back. I miss him already.”

“He never reckoned much to schooling and that. He said you could learn most what was worth knowing from keeping your eyes and ears peeled. Best way of learning, he always said, was doing.”

“There's room for all sorts of magic and miracles in this world - that's what I think.”

“My Albert married his Maisie Brown as he said he would. But I think she never took to me, nor I to her for that matter. Perhaps it was a feeling of mutual jealousy.”