“It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.”

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.

One can’t love humanity. One can only love people.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

I have wolf blood and wolf bones. Don’t expect me to graze with sheep.

I swear if I were to rip myself open, it wouldn’t be blood that poured out of me, it would be him.

Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it.

Nothing counts so much as blood. The rest are just strangers.

You gonna do somethin’? or are you just gonna stand there and bleed?

The Church of Christ has been founded by shedding its own blood, not that of others; by enduring outrage, not by inflicting it. Persecutions have made it grow; martyrdoms have crowned it.

But the love of adventure was in father’s blood.

We willingly bleed ourselves dry for those we care without ever stopping to question, when is it enough?