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"It can't be an easy thing," Lucas said, "to make a country. It's tough enough to make a café. Or to make one be the way you imagined it. Unless you only let certain people in and keep the rest out."

Beneath every history, another history.

He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.

For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?

"Believe only what you know," he said.

Katherine finds him too intimate with his co-legate; anyone who has spent much time with Wolsey, she thinks, no longer knows what honesty is.

We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later.

It’s not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you’ve already commissioned your tomb.

"I know that in the United States people are what they choose to be," he said.

"A little cinder in the wind, Pablo - that's what you are."

"Everybody's worth something," Pablo said. "I mean - everybody's life got some meaning to it. You know - there's a reason for people."

"No kidding? A reason for you? What is it?"

"I don't know," Pablo confessed. "I ain't found out yet. But I know there is one."

Finally resuming the chair at my desk I feel in keen sympathy with my fellow-creatures, for I seem to see clearly again that all are akin. The racial lines, which once were bitterly real, now serve nothing more than marking out a living mosaic of human beings. And even here men of the same color are like the ivory keys of one instrument where each resembles all the rest, yet varies from them in pitch and quality of voice. And those creatures who are for a time mere echoes of another's note are not unlike the fable of the thin sick man whose distorted shadow, dressed like a real creature, came to the old master to make him follow as a shadow. Thus with a compassion for all echoes in human guise, I greet the solemn-faced "native preacher" whom I find awaiting me. I listen with respect for God's creature, though he mouth most strangely the jangling phrases of a bigoted creed.

"Are we friends today?" she asked him.

"There's a level, Justin, on which we're always friends. Then there's a level on which we can't be."