“Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.”

“Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

“Women tend to act heroically within their own moral universe, regardless of whether anyone else knows about it - donating more kidneys to nonrelatives than men do, for example. Men, on the other ha...”

“They had not yet started out across a continent of grief that a lifetime of walking could not cover.”

“An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain," one of the survivors wrote. "The equality of all men".”

“How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?”

“A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.”

“The more one judges, the less one loves.”

“[N]one of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us.”