“My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.”

“...he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.”

“I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.”

“Holiness is new affections, new desires, and new motivs that then lead to new behavior. If I don't see my sin as completely forgiven, then my affections, desires, and motives will be wrong. I will just aim to improve myself. My focus will be the consequence of my sin rather than hating the sin and desiring God in its place. Holiness is not new behaviors. Holiness is new affections...it is found in our desire of the Holy One”

“There is no singular meaning of wife. That is the point. That is its meaning. To see the wife fully through a multi-faceted lens is one of the central challenges facing society in the twenty-first century. To do this, new scripts are required that employ wife as a verb and as a gender-neutral concept. These are essential if we are to create necessary new narratives, new ways of living as women and men together.”

“It wasn't what you said", he told her."It was how I felt when you said it".”

“She passed her New York Reviews on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing.”