“As a prominent conservative told me that year, "We need to go out into the wilderness for a long time, and figure out how we can one day return.”

“We had slipped into each others lives seamlessly, as though we had known each other for years.”

“You're perfect for each other, she had insisted. "both of you act like you're already retired, always stuck at home reading books.”

“Was that semi-colon some kind of flirty wink or just bad punctuation?”

“No one had ever told them they might need each other one day, an for some reason, they hadn't figured it out themselves.”

“How long can I listen to the lies of prejudice? How long can I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness? Can I cast it aside, all this loyalty and this pride? Will I ever learn that there'll be no peace, that the war won't cease, until He returns?”

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”