Life has always been a matter of putting one’s feet down carefully.

She’s forgetting,′ Ellen said to Jack, plumping herself down on a chair. ‘All of her life is leaking out of her. Soon there will be nothing left.

It would be a simple matter if lives were lived by hindsight,’ Rushton said. ‘There is much we would not begin, if we could see how it would end.

My favourite mentor brother told me that there were three kinds of people: followers, leaders and scouts. Scouts are capeable of leadership, but they could not tolerate the responsibility of it. Disinclined to take orders either, they invariably flouted authority and fomented strife. This is why scouts, he said wryly, were the first to be sent into danger, It was half hoped they would be killed. ‘I fear you are destined to trouble us as a scout, little sister’ he said.

True sorrows do not pass like clouds or inclement weather... Sorrows are absorbed over time, and you reshape yourself around them. How you absorb them makes you what you are for good or ill. I think the only true and right way is to take our sorrows into us bravely and wholly, knowing they will hurt, and accepting that sometimes pain is unavoidable. It is when grief is suppressed or hidden that it does harm.

If we know one thing from experience it is that oppression does not crush rebellion, no matter how it tries,′ I told him. ‘It breeds it anew with every tyrannical act.

There are so many sad and ugly things in the world that I feel I must try to counterbalance them with whatever beauty I can produce. Setting a pretty table in a world of pain might seem callous, given that people are starving and living in dreadful disease and poverty. But in trying to create islands of beauty and peace, I feel I am honoring the dreams of the world.

Only humans think death is evil. But it is nature. Evil exist’s only in life. There is much good and evil alloted to each life.

Don’t you understand that wanting does not belong here, because that is what wounds, and there is never an end to it.

The deepest wounds aren’t the ones we get from other people hurting us. They are the wounds we give ourselves when we hurt other people.