An insouciant flip of the wrist—
Your sorrow is of no interest to me, Sandoz said softly. If you want absolution, go to a priest.
Your Holiness, we are more than prepared to concede that overpopulation alone is not the sole cause of poverty and misery, Giuliani began. Fatuous oligarchies, Gelasius suggested. Ethnic paranoia. Whi...
You know what’s the most terrifying thing about admitting that you’re in love?...You put yourself in harm’s way and you lay down all your defenses...Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it...
You know what I think? Ten percent of any group of human beings are shitheads. Catholics, Jews. Germans, Italians. Pilots, priests. Teachers, doctors, shopkeepers. Ten percent are shitheads. Another t...
Why is it that God gets all the credit for the good stuff, but it's the doctor's fault when shit happens? When the patient comes through, it's always 'Thank God,' and when the patient dies, it's alway...
WELL, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, the Stella Maris is on her way out of the solar system,
They all knew it was gallows humor. There would be babies born to thirteen-year-olds who would show up at the clinic with stomachaches. Backs and shoulders wrenched, wrists damaged, knees torn at the...
There's an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove himself from some part of the universe, so something besid...
There is simply no alternative. We have to know them.
The trick is not to care. I have a perfect indifference to winning.
The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances, is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hatin...
Say what you will about Mormons, but they are very fine dancers.
On December 7, 2059, Emilio Sandoz was released from the isolation ward of Salvator Mundi Hospital in the middle of the night and transported in a bread van to the Jesuit residence at Number 5 Borgo S...
No children? Emilio asked them one evening, to his own surprise. Nope. Turned out, we don't breed well in captivity, George said, unembarrassed.
In his own soul, he knew with sudden certainty that it was not rebellion or doubt or even sin that broke God's heart; it was indifference.
I think the world will be a better place when science has swept all religion into the dustbin of history. What is religion but a shared belief in things that cannot be known? When we substitute concur...
House-training, I must tell you, is a formality that can elude young dachshunds for some time; this is particularly true in climates that affront their sensibilities with outrageous meteorological ins...
He found the life of Jesus profoundly moving; the miracles, on the other hand, seemed a barrier to faith, and he tended to explain them to himself in rational terms. It was as though there were only s...
He did not believe in luck at all, good or bad. Gamblers believed in luck, and he was not a gambler. Never had been, never would be. John Henry Holliday believed in mathematics, in statistics, in the...