“So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.”

God save us always,’ I said ‘from the innocent and the good.

The hands of the guilty don’t necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see each other.

It’s a good world if you don’t weaken.

As long as one suffers one lives.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

All good novelists have bad memories.

When we are not sure, we are alive.

Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.

Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long.

I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

Not everyone knows what to do when they come across a snowflake in the desert.

The deserts of the Middle East are in need of water, not bombers.

We must go out into a desert of some kind (your backyard will do) and come into a personal experience of the awesome love of God.

There were two saints in the desert, who had sewed thorns into all their clothes; and we seek for nothing but comfort!

The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies, and still defying fortune’s spite; revive from ashes and rise.

That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.

On the one hand, I want to go off and live in the desert with my dog and sculpt things out of adobe.

A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.