“It had been so beautiful. Life had been so simple and so terribly beautiful.”

“Hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple.”

“Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.”

“Yangi, a philosopher, art historian and poet, had evolved a theory of why some objects - pots, baskets, cloth made by unknown craftsmen - were so beautiful. In his view, they expressed unconscious beauty because they had been made in such numbers that the craftsman had been liberated from his ego.”

“Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

“Chase was gone then, and Donnie was back, alone in his room, wondering about those pictures from an art book he'd so admired. Because it felt like he'd just lived one, and it had been beautiful, so beautiful, and he'd been able to reach out and touch the lines of it, but it still hurt.”