“If you can't be proud of what you do, go and sell shoes. Do something else.”

“When you wish for something over and over again and it doesn't come true, something else happens; not only do you give up, but you resent your wish and you resent wishing.”

“But you can't worry about what life's going to spit in your direction.”

“People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe”

“And Lynnie understood. There were two kinds of hope: the kind you couldn't do anything about and the kind you could. And even if the kind you could do something about wasn't what you'd originally wanted, it was still worth doing. A rainy day is better than no day. A small happiness can make a big sadness less sad. p 313"The sky was crying outside, and as she watched the drops come down, she thought: A rainy day can actually be a very important day. And a small hope isn't really small if it makes a lost hope less sad." p 318Lynnie about the lost hope of finding Homan, the hope of seeing the lighthouse/connecting with her daughter and how selling her art work was doing something about it.”

“Funny thing about those Middle Ages, said Joseph. "They just keep coming back. Mortals keep thinking they're in Modern Times, you know, they get all this neat technology and pass all these humanitarian laws, and then something happens: there's an economic crisis, or science makes some discovery people can't deal with. And boom, people go right back to burning Jews and selling pieces of the true Cross. Don't you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.”

“Is that what they call a vocation, what you do with joy as if you had fire in your heart, the devil in your body?”