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...
Maybe poetry is the only way we can get near the truth of God.… And when the metaphors fail, we think it’s God who’s failed us!
Jimmy was no fool but he’d been well loved by good parents and well taught by good teachers, and those two facts accounted for the habit of obedience that mystified and enraged Peggy Soong. Over and o...
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...
For he had never heard anything like it--did not know such music existed in the world--and it was hard to believe that a man he knew could play it with his own two hands. There were parts of it like b...
For Russian Jews, Zionism was an immediate solution to age-old problems.Anywhere is better than Russia, Karl agreed, but for Western Jews, Zionism is a trap, I think. Once Jews are permitted a territo...
Flaubert tells us that three things are required for happiness: stupidity, selfishness, and good health. I am, he told Morgan, an unhappy man
Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize...
Dead men don’t pay for baths, haircuts, meals, or beds. Dead men don’t buy new clothes, or ammunition, or saddles. Dead men don’t desire fancy Coffeyville boots with Texas stars laid into the shank. T...
Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I’m presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.
At the risk of descent into unscientific generalization, I must report to you that ninety percent of Texans give the other ten percent a bad name, he told Martha Anne
After all, he thought, the one thing an agnostic knows for sure is: you never know.
A tale begins and where it ends, matters. Who tells the story and why, that makes all the difference.
You know, I’ve always thought it was a tactical mistake for God to love us in the aggregate, when Satan is willing to make a special effort to seduce each of us separately.
You know how people say, Don't borrow trouble? Well, said Morgan, I guess it's the opposite of that. Doc is borrowing happiness.
Why, he had once wondered, would a perfect God create the universe? To be generous with it, he believed now. For the pleasure of seeing pure gifts appreciated. Maybe that’s what it meant to find God:...