She was alone and destitute in a world of pointless carnage. By an eight-hundred-year-old Sepahrdic tradition she ad been since the age of twelve and a half bogeret l'reshut nafsha--an adult wit autho...
Later that summer, as rain fell, such a moment shimmered and paused on the brink, and then began the ancient dance of numbers: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and a new life took root and began...
In the beginning, Scripture taught, there was the Word, and Danny would come to believe that the two great gifts his God had given to the species He loved were time, which divides experience, and lang...
Trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but nonbelievers often experienc...
What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren't human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.
They spoke then, with the dear and ordinary intimacy of the well-married in the eye of a storm. [369]
You know what? I really resent the idea that the only reason someone might be good or moral is because they're religious. I do what I do, Anne said, biting off each word, without hope of reward or fea...
No one who does not live with constant pain can imagine the toll it takes. The way it grinds you down. The sheer damnable tedium of it.
Like we say back home, when you find a turtle settin’ on top of a fencepost, you can be pretty damn sure he didn’t get there on his own.
Its not lying, it's remembering things the way they should have been.
He's not a bad guy, John. It's human nature. He wanted it to be some mistake I made that he wouldn't have made, some flaw in me that he didn't share, so he could believe it wouldn't have happened to h...
[Emilio] felt once more the strangely visceral thrill of trying to disprove a hypothesis he suspected was robust.
Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between ‘That doesn’t make sense’ and ‘I don’t understand.’ Then I must be very wisdom. I don’t understand anything.
Ringo's chuckle got tangled up with a cough. He tossed back a shot, cleared his throat, and said, Politics, from the Latin. , meaning 'many.' meaning 'bloodsucking little bastards.
It was then that she experienced an instant of unprecedented clarity, a moment of wholly unanticipated certainty that God was real. The sensation fled almost as quickly as it came but left in its wake...
I'll take honest arrogance over fake humility any day.
Bein' born is craps, he decided. He glanced at Morg and let loose that sly, lopsided smile of his. How we live is poker.
And you believe you will succeed, where God has failed me?
Until you get the measure of your own soul, Jim, don't be quick to condemn a priest, or anyone else for that matter. I'm not scolding you, sweetheart, she said hurriedly. It's just that, until you've...
The poor you will always have with you,' Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?