“Shut up, shut up, will you! Nobody minds that you are in pain. Pain is a human condition. You do not care that I am hungry, do you? And therefore I do not need to care whether you are in agony. Nob...”

“A demigod who reaches his apotheosis never mourns for himself.It is the business of his many adulators to mourn for him. He cannot feel sadness to be so great, leaving all the rest of us to champio...”

“Attracting musicians is rather like inviting flies over to tea: they are tolerable for half an hour, but when they begin to touch the food, you either wish they would go home or die.”

“Life is really a travesty of will: it is a parade of learning how to lose people and improve at feigning indifference.I suspect I shall always fail at this, and fail miserably. I do not know whethe...”

“Life makes beggars out of those who have joyful hearts, taxing the living with hardship and tribulation, but the charity of companionship, the currency of shared and unmitigated love, alleviates al...”

“This book is a work of fiction.Actually, it is a work of fiction within a fiction, as the main characters, though real persons in a fictional world, are being depicted in a book which other fiction...”

“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.”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”

“Every great love starts with a great story...”

“I knew, in the silence that followed, that anything could happen here. It might be too late: again, I might have missed my chance. But I would at least know I tried, that I took my heart and extend...”

“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”