No child should ever be too sad to play.

The amusements of life, he argued, should be accepted with the same philosophy as its ills. ("The Striding Place")

If there is anything worse than evil, it is nothingness. At least evil has a form, and a voice, and a purpose, however depraved. Perhaps some good can even come out of evil: a terrible deed of violence against someone weaker may lead others to act in order to ensure that such a deed is not perpetrated again, whereas before they might have been unaware of the reasons why an individual might behave in such a way, or they might simply have chosen to ignore them. And evil, as we saw with the Blacksmith, always contains within itself the possibility of its own redemption. It is not evil that is the enemy of hope: it is nothingness.

There were happy days, with watermelon, and sad days of whiskey.

Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.

Sadness is not the beginning or end of a process, but the lag between pleasure and happiness.