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“…isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?”

“If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.”

“What if one were to dissolve into the wilderness like salt into water.”

“What if one wanted to disappear into the wilderness instead?”

“Isn’t that why we’re here? To leave a mark on wilderness?”

“A life of solitude could be a very pleasant thing.”

“What can life be made to accommodate, what can one life hold inside itself without breaking.”

“What has not yet been lost, what still at least for this moment remains. To do what little good he can with his life. To ask for nothing more, to bow his head, pitifully grateful, God's humble and grateful servant. Can he imagine anything less like himself? And yet here he is, defeated, relieved, forgiving everything, praying only to be forgiven.”

“To be loved, yes, for no reason, with no imaginable reward.”

“Remained inside him, trapped, festering, turning into something stranger and worse. Proliferation of inappropriate attachments. Holding hard, harder, clutching, not letting go. Well, if that's suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.”

“Attachment, the cause of all suffering, so the Buddhists say. To cling to what you have, what you have had, the life you have known, the handful of people and places you have ever really loved, to cling and not let go. Never relenting, never accepting, becoming all the time more enmeshed, holding harder, loving and hating more.”

“Difficulties, certain problems to be negotiated, but isn't that what it means to love someone?”

“The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way of saying: more life, more and more of life.”

“Human beings, flawed, okay, but not literally evil. Yes, the world makes room for goodness and decency, he thinks: and the task of life is to show goodness to others, not to complain about their failings.”

“Life itself, every moment of life is as precious beautiful as any game of chess ever played, if only you know how to live.”

“Doesn't the feeling between people have a truth of its own?”

“To love, and for his love to be accepted, yes. It was in fact painful, the relief of all that compression suddenly, to say the words aloud, and hear her saying them, to be loved by her, it was so needed that it actually hurt.”

“People should do their best for one another in times of grief. Loss is something that should be shared, expressed, consoled, not kept separate and silent.”

“Under what conditions is life endurable?”

“What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.”

“Because she's always been afraid of life, she doesn't so much mind leaving it. But then, on a day like this, she says, when the world is so beautiful (she is sitting somewhere out-doors, I recall, no doubt somewhere in the moors), she confesses that she wouldn't mind living just a little longer.”

“You want to forgive all, my friend said, and you should forgive all. But you discover that some things you can't forgive, not even when you know you're dying. And then that becomes its own open wound, she said: the inability to forgive.”

“No matter how sad, a beautifully told story lifts you up.”

“There are no truly stupid human beings, no uninteresting human lives, and that you'd discover this if you were willing to sit and listen to people. But sometimes you had to be willing to sit for a very long time.”

“They say one way to lift yourself up when you're down is to do something for somebody else.”

“In the end, he remained hidden all his life. In spite of the great departure, the ambitious effort to forge a new existence, be fell back into all the same traps: shame, the impossibility of sharing a love that endures.”

“Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash.”