“It is well to pray when the troubles perch and your pillow is cheated of sleep. It is well at all times, even when there are no troubles and no petitions to be made.”

“Do you agree that we should order them back into the house and then scatter these watchers an send them home? If they refuse to obey there will be trouble. We will have to slit throats. I confess to you, Eleazer , that I do not like slitting throats at a wedding.”

“When is this old moneybags doing to give up and die as any decent man would do? I am tired of standing at his door.”

“You have the chance of a lifetime and your ready to throw it away because their's a crack in your skull.”

“History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit.”

“Adam was snoring vigorously, Luke with dignity and serenity, the servants like a full orchestra..”

“Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.”