If it were possible to escape from lonely experiences for a moment and stand back from the tree one would see the myriad bright worlds sparkling upon it. But only the greatest could do that. For all but the greatest their own experience was a prison house until the ending of the days. But one could know how bright was the light that carried all souls back to the light when for a moment one entered the world of a child.

She had that transparent honesty and purity and serenity that like clear water flooding over the bed of a stream washes away uncleanness, and makes fresh and divinely lovely all that is seen through its own transparency. We see the world through the medium of our own characters, and Marguerite saw and loved all things through her own bright clarity, and enjoyed them enormously.

The small children and the very old, with the stuff of life hardly yet grasped or perforce nearly relinquished, were protected and secure and could enjoy their dreams and illusions immune from the daily wear and tear. And how lucky they were!

She did not suppose for a moment that anything worth having, and she now knew faith to be supremely worth having, was ever easy to have.

Shame could wrench just as fear did. Thinking how other men would have behaved in his place was the most searching form of humiliation that he knew; and he knew a good many.

Nothing is ever over,” said Jean. “You thread things on your life and think you’ve finished with them, but you haven’t because it’s like beads on a string and they come round again...

She would not rest until existence was for her a sucked orange. When there was no drop of juice left, then she would fling away the rind and die content.

The God who had thrust him through in the darkness with probings of dread and shame was the same God who now held out the sword and shield.

Illness was admirable training in the creative art of grateful acceptance. Pain accepted was just pain, and heavy, but Harriet believed that pain gladly accepted took wings, went somewhere and did something.

Firelight and Polly had lent a momentary charm to the parlor but now, looking up at the portrait, he was aware of having passed under the shadow of a dark hand. Emma, he realized, lived under it always. Her parlor was her past, and Isaac’s, and if Issac in tearing himself out of its grip had torn himself too he was better off with his asthma and his nerves and his eccentricity than Emma. Better to struggle through life with a broken wing than have no wings at all.