#epiphany

"I used to think how lucky she was to have me, but now I realize that’s backwards. A spirit of gratitude yields patience, love, and forgiveness."

"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them."

"So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it."

"Whose little boy are you?"

"I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking"

"He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?"

"For the first time in his life he understood why the Bible called sex "knowing". Everything was different. Now he knew Dante. He'd known Dante. And wonder of wonders, Dante had known him right back."

"Now the wren has gone to roost and the sky is turnin' goldAnd like the sky my soul is also turnin'Turnin' from the past, at last and all I've left behind"