Denise Giardina

“Kings can choose other than to sin. They can choose death instead.”

“I have traveled outside the mountains, but never lived apart from them. I always feared mountains would be as jealous, as unforgiving, as any spurned lover. Leave them and they may never take you back. Besides, I never felt a need to go. There is enough to study in these hills to last a lifetime.”

“Every way I turned the lush green peaks towered over me. Had it been winter or spring, they would have been iron gray or dappled with pink and white dogwood, sarvis, and redbud, but always they would be there, the mountains, their heights rounded by the elements like relics worn smooth by the hands of reverent pilgrims.”

“How was God supposed to stop it? You're a free man, Alois. There are no invisible strings connecting you to God, directing your every move.'But if God is all-powerful, God could intervene. God could find a way.'And because God didn't intervene, it was all right.'Yes.'Too bad you don't believe in God, then. You've lost your excuse.'Bauer blinked. He looked away. 'Perhaps I do believe in God,' he said.Oh yes,' Dietrich said. 'God makes a convenient scapegoat. Or people always think God is absent when things are going bad for them. Things go better and God is back. Well, I want to live in the world as if there were no God. That is the only way God can truly be with any of us.”

“And what more can God do,' he asks, 'then to take on flesh and suffer every humiliation and every fear and every pain that humanity suffers? What more without destroying human freedom?”