“Wart meets Merlin for the first time only for Merlin, who lives backwards, it's the last time. The old wizard weeps and the boy can't understand why. It's a powerful expression of the gulf between...”

“I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)”

“Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.”

“Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in.”

“The rules for raising children had gone out with her parents generation of daughters who had lived as Lucy had, in patient silence, acting by standards which had lasted generations, waiting to grow...”

“Didnt young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?”

“In the travellers world, social media have enlarged the generation gap. The internet has brought a change in the very concept of travel as a process taking one away from the familiar into the unkno...”

“Life is all about practicing for heaven." p 101.”

“The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.”

“And because Eddie knew that was only the truth, he said nothing.”