“She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.”

“The other day an entomologist friend of mine told me that for a beehive to produce a kilo of honey it must gather pollen from five million flowers. Thinking of this extraordinary effort I have been wondering how many books Baudelaire had to read, how many lives he had to live, to write a single line of poetry.”

“The wold was full of us, the leftovers and the leavers, the bereaved and the broken.”

“The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness.”

“Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary. Washington had gone to war.”

“Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.”

“He was what she had always needed her father to be.”

“This is what the Problem means,” he went on. “This is the effect it has. Lives lost, loved ones taken before their time. And then we hide our dead behind iron walls and leave them to the thorns and ivy. We lose them twice over, Lucy. Death’s not the worst of it. We turn our faces away.”