“Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and throughly worth living.”

“And then I went out to the ocean. Do you know what it was like? The waves broke, and each time they did, as they slapped against the sand, I could feel it all through my body. And each time they broke, and each time they thudded down, they said, you have only one life, you have only one life.”

“Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?”

“Life is full of detours, most likely years worth, but the "detours" get you to where you were meant to be.”

“A prison chaplain in the West of England confessed he had given up one prisoner as hopeless, so stubborn was he against any approach by him, and known throughout the jail as the most truculent and obstinate troublemaker.But one day the governor was told of a visitor who insisted on seeing him. To his surprise, it was a little girl. "He's my daddy," she explained, "It's his birthday." The governor allowed the prisoner to be sent for."Daddy," said the child as he was brought in, "this was your birthday, so I wanted to come and see you." Then taking a lock of hair out of her pocket, she offered it to him. "I had no money to buy a present for you. But I brought this, a lock of my own hair."The prisoner broke down and clasped her in his arms, sobbing. He became a changed man after that and guarded, as his most precious possession, the lock of hair that reminded him that somebody still loved him.”

“I tried on Claire's double strand of pearls in the mirror, ran the smooth, lustrous beads through my fingers, touched the coral rose of the clasp. The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.”