“Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipe. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man's efficiency.”

“If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?”

“Enough pain makes a coward of anyone.”

“It was a look that gave her a tingle, all right, but not in a good way. In that look she saw her silly bloody hopes as twisted and broken as shed left that Lowlanders arm, and it was no ones fault ...”

“A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time and never gotten anywhere.”

“Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.”

“No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

“All my life I've been surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, but I found I could always keep up by working hard.”

“Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring--this is one of the harshest human miseries.”

“Sibyl, what do you want?I want to live, the Sibyl said, and her voice rang rich and full. I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world a...”

“When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the suspension of disbelief and activity of the imagination that ...”

“When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it.”

“There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree”

“Two lost things that had survived the seas and arrived on a coastline. What did they do? They implanted themselves in the sand and grew into trees and lined the beaches. Sometimes a lot can come of...”

“Once you decide to grow out the roses from your heart, and let it spread the roots all over. you should also start to learn to handle the thorns that grow out of their stem.”