“We live what God wants when He wants us to. He withholds joy for a time, then lavishes it all around. He shelters us from pain until He knows we'll live through it. The point is, what matters is this moment. How precious, precious time is. The past had to happen, and we cannot stop the future. Why, then, should we live with a spirit of fear and regret?”

“So how could you ever eat another strawberry and not know that God loves you? I want you to think about that every time you eat a strawberry. Do you hear me?”

“Life is always uncertain,'he said with a shrug. 'We cannot let the fear of what might happen stop us living as we choose.”

“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”

“Ann: If we know God, we do not need to know why He allows us to experience what we do.”

“Allah, Most High, has truly blessed us. He has created just for us the mysterious spirit that He has breathed into us and by so doing distinguished us from all other physical creation. He has adorned us with our incomparable intellect, which further distinguishes us from all else in this creation. What other creature on this planet -another gift He has blessed us with- can even begin to create the likes of this Internet? Will we not stop, give thanks to our Merciful and Generous Lord? Will we not stop and realize how precious our lives are and begin to show each other more love, mercy, kindness and empathy? Will we not stop, take time, and reflect?”

“Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will comfort and enlighten someone else. What then is my responsibility? What am I to restrain? What am I to fear and alter--my own nakedness or the grief of the reader? I want my stories to be so good they are unforgettable; to make my ideas live and my own terrors real for people I will never meet. It is a completely amoral writer's lust. If we begin to agree that some ideas are too dangerous, too bad to invite inside our heads, then we stop the storyteller completely. We silence everyone who would tell us something that might be painful in our vulnerable moments.”