“Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?”

“Soon would come the night in which there was no more work not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.”

“Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.”

“I think good conversation is really the best form of sex.”

“Were archaeologists really such a sex-starved lot as all that? Did pigs really sweat?”

“Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.”

“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic.”

“Just fancy! One can hear and see the grass growing,' thought Levin, as he noticed wet slate-coloured aspen leaf move close to the point of a blade of grass.”

“Meanwhile, spring came, and with it the outpourings of Nature. The hills were soon splashed with wild flowers; the grass became an altogether new and richer shade of green; and the air became scent...”

“Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away.”

“I'm trying to remember how you tell the time by looking at the sun." -"I should leave it for a while, it's too bright to see the numbers at the moment.”

“The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.”