“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
“Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.”
“In the distance thunder echoed round the mountains. The air was heavy and humid. I was sweating, but the sweat was turning cold in my forehead. I jumped across the ditch of the last terraced field and looked down to where my home had always been. The house was gone.”
“Read them and you hear echoes of one story inside another, then echoes of another inside that. So many have the same premise: once upon a time, there were three.”
“Then a moment’s pause, while both sides look up at the spinning ball. There is flies, straight between the two posts, some five feet above the cross-bar, an unquestioned goal; and a shout of real, genuine joy rings out from the School-house players-up, and faint echo of it comes over the close from the goal-keepers under the Doctor’s wall. A goal in the first hour - such a thing hasn’t been done in the School-house match these five years.”