“Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”

“After she was gone there would be no one who knew the whole of her life. She did not even know the whole of it! Perhaps she should have written some of it down...but really what would have been the point in that? Everything passed, she would too. This perspective offered her an unexpected clarity she nearly enjoyed, but even with this new clarity the world offered no more explanation for itself than it ever had.”

“The twenty-seven books of the New Testament were all written within two generations of the time of Jesus--in other words, by the end of the first century at the latest--though most scholars would put most of them earlier than that.”

“Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?”

“If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even.”

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”