“…Or he could choose life. At that pivotal moment, it occurred to him that with all hisschooling in theology he had, perhaps, missed the entire point of his studies, the verycrux of the gospel he had professed to believe. That the measure of a person’s heart, thebarometer of good or evil, was nothing more than the extent of their willingness tochoose life over death. That the path of God was, simply, the path of life, abundant andeternal. And this is where he failed, for to choose life is to choose sorrow as well as joy,pain as well as pleasure. When Hunter had buried Rachel, he buried along with her hisheart, lest it might heal and feel and grow again. And in so doing he had chosen morethan death, he had chosen damnation itself, for damnation is nothing more than to stopa thing in its eternal progression. In that first flight from West Chester he had run notonly from the horror and pain of death but from life itself.”

“The thing is, the only real sign of life is growth. And growth requires pain. So to choose life is to accept pain.”

“The only way to remove pain from death is to remove love from life.”

“Despite everything he had or might have (except, of course, another human being), life gave no promise of improvement or even of change. The way things shaped up, he would live out his life with no more than he already had. And how many years was that? Thirty, maybe forty if he didn’t drink himself to death. The thought of forty more years of living as he was made him shudder”

“In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.”

“Don't let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was”

“He had loved is mother and his child, everything that it was not up to him to choose. And after all he, who had challenged everything, questioned everything, he had never loved anything except what was inevitable. The people fate had imposed on him, the world as it appeared to him, everything in his life he had not been able to avoid, his illness, his vocation, fame or poverty--in a word, his star. For the rest, for everything he had to choose, he made himself love, which is not the same thing. No doubt he had known the feeling of wonderment, passion, and even moments of tenderness. But each moment had sent him on to other moments, each person to others, and he had loved nothing he had chosen, except what was little by little imposed on him by circumstance, had lasted as much by accident as by intention, and finally became necessary: Jessica. The heart, the heart above all is not free. It is inevitability and the recognition of the inevitable. And he, in truth, had never wholeheartedly loved other than the inevitable. All that was left for him was to love his own death.”