As far as Wyatt Earp knew, it was not illegal to beat a horse. In the past few years, he’d worked as a part-time policeman in a string of Kansas cow towns. Each time he was sworn in, he made an effort...
Abandon a dachshund and upon your return, you may well be confronted with a small token of her displeasure. This, for the dachshund, is an undignified but necessary form of training. Eventually, you w...
You’ve seen what, Emilio conceded, but not why! That’s where God is, Anne. In the why of it—in the meaning.
When a man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it works.And the hundredth boy?We can go either way. Kill the old man, or...
No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace.
Maybe God is only the most powerful poetic idea we humans’re capable of thinkin’, he said one night, after a few drinks. Maybe God has no reality outside our minds and exists only in the paradox of Pe...
Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.
It was politicians saying, Let’s you and him fight!
It no longer came as a surprise to John Candotti that people found him easy to confess to. He was tolerant of human failings and it was rarely difficult for him to say, Well, you screwed up. Everybody...
I do not want to spend another of whatever I have left bein' scared. I can't carry the fear anymore. Not mine. Not yours. I have to lay that burden down.
Hope—cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora’s box—smiled on him gently all that summer.
The world is filled with unreasonable hate. What's wrong with unreasonable love?
The trick is not to care. I have a perfect indifference to winning.
So much of what he knew about religion struck him as total bullshit; he was disarmed when the fathers freely admitted that some stories were in fact pious fictions. But, judging his character, they da...
Say what you will about Mormons, but they are very fine dancers.
My life has a certain amusing symmetry, if viewed with sufficient detachment.
I believe in God the way I believe in quarks, she said coolly. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist....
How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking? He said nothing more that day, but Ha’anala spent hours considering his words. A soul, she decided, was the most real part of a person, and to discov...
Home, he said softly. If there is a more beautiful word in any language, I do not know it.
He was aware of his agnosticism, and patient with it. Rather than deny the existence of something he couldn’t perceive himself, he acknowledged the authenticity of his uncertainty and carried on, pray...