“To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.”

“With eye and hand and breath and will.”

“Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good...”

“... privilege was obligation; command was service; power, the gift itself, entailed a heavy loss of freedom.”

“Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him.”

“I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. . . . For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning: "The girl went through the experience that...”

“The hoopoe said: 'Your heart's congealed like ice;When will you free yourself from cowardice?Since you have such a short time to live here,What difference does it make? What should you fear?The wor...”

“When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?”

“He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.”

“Happiness, like unhappiness, is a proactive choice.”

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.''In fact,' said Mustapha Mond, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' 'All ...”