If you cast away one cross, you will certainly find another, and perhaps a heavier.
Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Every child has the capacity to be everything.
Since humans are by nature tribal, the overall goal is to expand the concept of the tribe to include ALL members of the species, in a global free society.
. . . , listening to the storm outside as it left the city, knowing that I was going to lose her but also knowing that, for a few minutes, we had belonged to one another, and to nobody else.
I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.
Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.