"No crime short of murder... can be comparable to the crime of destroying in another the capacity to love: and this happens sometimes through the rashness of parents... but more often through some bitterness of experience when youth is still defenseless."
"I cannot help believing that if she had wanted life more, she could have held it: but she was not interested, and accepted death as she had accepted her marriage and her baptism, and no one outside her could help."
"I hope I shall not become so, resenting ideas that are not my ideas, and seeing the world with all its changes and growth as a series of congealed formulas."
"I never imagined that my first sight of the desert would come with such a shock of beauty and enslave me right away."
"But anything was possible, Freya was now allowing herself to believe, if she could only detach herself from the tender shackles that had kept her bound to home for so long."
"It came I think from a feeling which influences me greatly, whose beginning I cannot remember and whose origin I cannot trace - a feeling for the value of affection in itself, and a reluctance to waste any of it that happened to come my way."
"Freya was burnishing her new persona, burying the shy girl of her youth and creating a self-sufficiency to match her growing reputation as a person of fearless, even heroic, deeds."
"How brittle in reality are all the things whose permanence is never questioned."
"Freya, the chronic nomad, liked the thought of Venetia's stable life, while Venetia enjoyed the open horizons of Freya's."
"It is ridiculous to care so much, but after all there is less difference between us and a lizard than between us and God and we expect Him to feel an interest."
"Bribing people to adjust their beliefs was both cynical and repugnant."
"After Flora's death she used the writing to understand their complicated relationship and came to a forgiveness and reconciliation she could not have achieved had Flora been alive."
"... and the art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows."
"Perseverance is often praised, but it is not so often realized that another quality must accompany it to make it of any value - and that is elasticity; perseverance in only one direction very often fails: but if one is ready to take whatever road is offered, and to change the chosen way, if circumstances change, and yet to keep the end in view - then success is infinitely more probable."
"And it hardly made sense, she insisted, to make Palestinians pay with their homes and lands for injuries done to Jews by European Christians."
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