K.J. Bishop

“Your people are not unwise, after all: love of the perfect Deity may prevent us from loving imperfect man! But God's will is to restore the lost; and that can't be done without loving them.”

“It occurs to me that my thinking has been faulty: we do not feel God's absence. We feel the absence of all that is lost to God, that which has set itself apart and refuses to return, believing itself to be in exile.”

“Evil flourishes because the good aren't good enough," see murmured. "And sometimes the good just have bad days.”

“You see yourself as something of a champion of the poor, don't you?" "No, just their doctor.”

“Tobacco Will Slowly and Surely Kill You." And so will time, Gwynn thought. But if you want the job done quickly, professionals recommend bullet.”

“My soul longs for God, but a man is not just his soul, is he? Terrible to say, my clay lusts after the clay of nubile girl. To soothe my guilt, and please forgive my indelicacy, I have convinced myself that I seek to find God again in their arms and their unmentionable places.”

“Time steals from us the capacity to be smitten, does it not? It slowly but surely washes away all your enthusiasm and deposits uncertainty in its place.”

“Could your god and this infernal be called enemies, then?""It is more complicated than that. God knew what was going to happen, of course. The divine has a plan for the infernal. Because all is of God and nothing of God can truly be destroyed, the infernal must instead be transmuted. It must realise its error, comprehend the illogicality of its existence, and choose to become part of the divine. When all is converted, the erroneous potential will no longer exist. Perfection will be achieved. We are all subjects, substances, in this greatest alchemy, the Great Work of God.”

“Think of a potter taking a misshapen bowl from his wheel and pounding it back into the tub of clay. A soul suffers while it is being pounded in this way, and suffers until it ceases to be. You are pounded down, and that which was you gets into something else. God tries again, and tries until the Work is complete. Meanwhile you, my son, are long gone”

“The wisdom which is now conventional claims that light creates shadows. But the facts are otherwise. Darkness came first and is infinitely older and more enduring than light. Light borrows a little space; then it dies or moves on, and the dark exists again as if it had never been disturbed.”

“There were no milestones in the Copper Country. Often a traveler could only measure the progress of a journey by the time it took to get from each spoiled or broken thing to the next: a half-day’s walk from a dry well to the muzzle of a cannon poking out of a sand-slope, two hours to reach the skeletons of a man and a mule. The land was losing its battle with time. Ancient and exhausted, it visited decrepitude on everything within its bounds, as though out of spleen.”

“The goodness of the world grew like moss in cracks, she thought. It grew, somehow, with hidden roots, nourished by something unseen.”

“How long before we devise a means of telling horoscopes with gas lamps?”

“Somewhere there are gardens where peacocks sing like nightingales, somewhere there are caravans of separated lovers traveling to meet each other; there are ruby fires on distant mountains, and blue comets that come in spring like sapphires in the black sky. If this is not so, meet me in the shameful yard, and we will plant a gallows tree, and swing like sad pendulums, never once touching.”

“Albo niczego nie można wybaczyć, albo nie ma nic do wybaczania.”

“In the end, having no compass for his desires, he yielded to his nature.”