My reputation is largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion, in part because the truth had the kind of pathos in it that would bring on sympathy in its least bearable forms.

Well, but I shaved carefully and put on a white shirt and buffed my shoes a little, and so on. I think such preparations can be the difference between an elderly gentleman and a codger. I know the former is a more suitable consort for your lovely mother, but sometimes I forget to go to the necessary trouble, and that’s an error I mean to correct.

To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear.

A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preposterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on.

I remember Boughton was already worrying about his vocation. He was afraid it wouldn’t come to him, and then he’d have to find another kind of life, and he couldn’t really think of one. We’d go through the possibilities we were aware of. There weren’t many.

There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s mortal insufficiency to us.

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either.