A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong

If you expect to never make a mistake with the people you love, you’ll only disappoint yourself. Over and over.

I’d think a man who has sinful thoughts, yet conducts himself decently, is a better exemplar of virtue than a man who’s never tested by such thoughts at all.

He’d shut the door on the subject of loss, thrown all the bolts, and shoved a heavy table up against it for good measure.

There was little point in mourning a thing you’d never had, and so she didn’t mourn, most days.

It’s not unlike a marriage, the partnership. All the effort and good intentions in the world can’t make things right if you choose poorly in the first place.

No doubt she'd thought she was doing him a kindness, urging him to kick up his heels and loosen his too-tight cravat and learn to savor careless pleasures. As though he hadn't heard such urgings before, from every feckless acquaintance made uncomfortable by his example of propriety, or every heedless one who sailed through life never noticing that it was vigilant people, the people standing back from the merriment, who stomped out the fiery raisins dropped by others and kept everything from going up in flames.

The smallest grain of natural honesty and benevolence has more effect on men’s conduct, than the most pompous views suggested by theological theories and systems.

A sodden leaf pinwheeled into the coachman’s face and stuck there. He let it remain, as though to make a show of his fitness for withstanding such out-of-door vagaries.

Hope, and faith that your efforts will have been enough. And as much peace as you can muster with the possibility that they won’t.