"It’s a terrible thing, being afraid. It’s like an illness; like wanting to fall down, and not being able to faint. You see you never get used to it. You live with it and live with it and every day it’s worse; and one day it’s the worst of all. I thought, when it...happened, I wouldn’t be afraid. But I was wrong...."

“A death was more than an ending; it was like pulling a thread from a richly patterned cloth.”

“The years had a way of piling themselves one atop the next, unnoticed and uncounted; that was how young men turned into old ones.”

“She curled her lip. She had discovered cynicism.”

“She stopped dead; and the look in her eyes showed plainly she’d just received the import of a crude lesson in economics.”

““Confession,” he said, “must be sincere. It must come from the heart. False confession, made to avoid the pain of Questioning, is useless to Church and God alike. Our aim is salvation; the salvation of the souls of these poor wretches in our charge, if necessary by the breaking of their bodies. Set against this, all else is straw in the wind.”

“The waves were indifferent, and the wind; and the rocks neither knew nor cared who owned them, Christ’s Vicar or an English King.”