What continues to astonish me about a garden is that you can walk past it in a hurry, see something wrong, stop to set it right, and emerge an hour or two later breathless, contented, and wondering what on earth happened.

Everything matters terribly to children, you know, they're fresh and unformed.

Hell is more like boredom, or not having enough to do, and too much time to contemplate one's deficiencies.

... people misunderstood death, they died not of too little life but of too much life, that as the skin withered and the future grew short it was the past that took on flesh, until ultimately the sheer accumulation of experience and memory became too heavy to carry.

We overlook how much in our lives is invisible love, for instance thought, God, the future, time, faith, hope and even the electricity that brings us light.

The best things arrive on time.

There are no happy endings, there are only happy people.

It's when we're given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves.

It's compassion that makes gods of us.

... old clothes, old friends, old books. One needs constants in a traveling life.

When we live with a memory we live with a corpse the impact of the experience has changed us once but can never change us again.