“I laid her life out on her desk like a losing hand of solitaire…”

The narrator in Spider Robinson Time Travelers Strictly Cash (he's going through a woman's personal documents)

“Men are not so interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of different forms of latchkey which exist in London or the time it would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape.”

G.K. Chesterton in The Defendant (1901), quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 #6 Issue 15 (April-May 1999)

“William James used to say that there was not much difference between one man and another but that the little difference there was was of great importance.”

Richard Hofstadter The American Political Tradition (author's 1967 Preface)

“Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.”

Judge (Billings) Learned Hand in “On Receiving an Honorary Degree” (1939) quoted on en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Learned_Hand

“We try to make virtues out of the faults we have no wish to correct.”

Francois, duc de La Rouchefoucauld, quoted on https://www.hound-dog-media.com

“When I was a little boy, she [his grandmother] would sometimes haul me by the ear over to the kitchen window and point out the bright, beautiful morning, saying, ‘Now, boy, we’ll pay for this.’”

Larry Pratt in Globe & Mail May 18, 1999

“happiness is an end and pleasure can only be a means.”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News April 27, 1912 quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #8 (July-August 2005)

“Fear not that life shall come to an end, but rather that it never had a beginning.”

John Henry Cardinal Newman, quoted in Paul Pearsall, The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need: Repress your anger, think negatively, be a good blamer, & throttle your inner child