» This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.
» Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.
» Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.
» It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
» Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.
» Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.