He has been around long enough to know that death is the only perfect cure for what ails mortals. After you have stood enough you die, and that is all right.

Though he would a lot rather let them lie still and be gone, once his mind strikes into his old troubles there is no stopping it; he is in his story then, watching, as he has helplessly done many times before, to see how one spell of trouble and sorrow led to another.

A vast difference lived between them even while they worked together—the difference between hopeful and hopeless work.

And when he put his mind to it he knew what it was: it was fear that in order to be what he might become he would have to cease to be what he had been...

He saw that he would be distinguished not by what he was or anything that he might become but by what he served.

That his life was renewed, that he had been driven down to the bedrock of his own place in the world and his own truth and had stood again, that a profound peace and trust had come to him out of his suffering and his solitude, and that this peace would abide with him to the end of his days—all this he knew in the quiet of his heart and kept to himself.

The modern ignorance is in people’s assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing it cannot prove, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.

A man, Old Jack thinks, has no choice but to be ignorant, but he does not have to be a fool. He can know his place, and he can stay in it and be faithful.

"It’s not a tragedy when a man dies at the end of his life."