“He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.”

“He divided the inhabitants of this world into two groups, into those who had loved and those who had not. It was a horrible aristocracy, apparently, for those who had no capacity for love (or rather for suffering in love) could not be said to be alive and certainly would not live again after their death. They were a kind of straw population, filling the world with their meaningless laughter and tears and chatter and disappearing still lovable and vain into thin air. For this distinction he cultivated his own definition of love that was like no other and that had gathered all its bitterness and pride from his odd life. He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living. There was (he believed) a great repertory of errors mercifully impossible to human beings who had recovered from this illness. Unfortunately there remained to them a host of failings, but at least (from among many illustrations) they never mistook a protracted amiability for the whole conduct of life, they never again regarded any human being, from a prince to a servant, as a mechanical object.”

“Love is the doorway through which the human soul passes from selfishness to service.”

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”

“Heav'n but the Vision of fulfill'd Desire,And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire,Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.”

“Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.”