I don’t know what’s more exhausting about parenting: the getting up early, or acting like you know what you’re doing.
The nicest thing in the world you can do for anybody is let them help you… Don’t get proud and say you don’t need it or want it. That’s a slap in the puss. Thing people like most in the world is to give you something and have you like it and need it.
What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life – to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.
Who, being loved, is poor?
I no longer believed in the idea of soul mates, or love at first sight. But I was beginning to believe that a very few times in your life, if you were lucky, you might meet someone who was exactly right for you. Not because he was perfect, or because you were, but because your combined flaws were arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together.
I love you more than there are stars in the sky and fish in the sea.
Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They’re its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.
Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and in sickness it would still be dear.
It was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.
The very first moment I beheld him, my heart was irrevocably gone.