“You seem to be turning into the theme of all my paint­ings”, she said. “The meeting of two worlds. A double exposure. Showing through the outline of Tomas the libertine, incredibly, the face of a romantic lover. Or, the other way, through a Tristan, always thinking of his Tereza, I see the beautiful, betrayed world of the libertine.”

“I see the beauty of the world through your eyes. I can't see it through my own.”

“You can see a rose both in two ways. First, through its beautiful petals. The other, through its thorns”

“Is that "great cloud of witnesses" watching my way so as to judge or is it informing my way so that I may walk it? Do they hide the light so that I cannot see it or do they filter it so that its blaze will not blind me? Can a man see God face to face and live? Can I not see an eclipse better through a pinhole in a paper than without it?We can't so much see light as we can see things because of it. So I do not meet God in a vacuum -- I meet Him in the world He has provided for me to meet Him in -- in a world of events and of places, of history (time and space), in a world of lives of people and their records of their encounters. I meet God in this world -- in the world of these things......and this is the world as best as I can remember it.”

“Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams.”

“Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;Whilst, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,Himself the primrose path of dalliance treadsAnd recks not his own read.”